The prosody of backchannels in American English

STEFAN BENUS; AGUSTÍN GRAVANO; JULIA HIRSCHBERG

Saarbruecken

Congreso; 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007); 2007

International Phonetic Association (IPA) and International Society of Phonetic Sciences (ISPhS)

We examine prosodic and contextual factors characterizing the backchannel function of single affirmative words. Data is drawn from collaborative task-oriented dialogues betweenspeakers of Standard American English. Despite high lexical variability, backchannels areprosodically well defined: they have higher pitch and intensity and greater pitch slope thanaffirmative words expressing other pragmatic functions. Additionally, we identify phrase-final rising pitch as a salient trigger for backchanneling.