Abstract: A system and method for triggering animated paralingual behavior from dialogue. The method including: receiving a corpus of dialogue including a plurality of samples, each sample including dialogue with aligned sequences of phonemes or sub-phonemes; extracting properties of measured quantities for each sample; generating a statistical profile by statistically classifying the extracted properties as a function of each sequence of phonemes or sub-phonemes; receiving a stream of phonemes or sub-phonemes and triggering paralingual behavior when the properties of any of the phonemes or sub-phonemes deviate from the statistical profile beyond a predetermined threshold; outputting the triggered paralingual behavior for animation.