ETRW on Dialogue and Prosody September 1-3, 1999 Veldhoven, The Netherlands

Low-Pitch Regions as Dialogue Signals? Evidence from Dialog-Act and Lexical Correlates in Natural Conversation

Nigel Ward

University of Tokyo, Japan

In earlier work, we identified a 110 millisecond region of low pitch as a prosodic feature which seems to bear the dialog function of encouraging back-channel feedback from the listener. In this paper, we examine the ways in which this prosodic feature co-occurs with semantic, pragmatic, and lexical events. Both subjective analysis and statistical analysis suggest that low-pitch regions are associated with the completion or near-completion of the transmission of some unit of information, the occurrence of a disluency, and the occurrence of back-channel feedback. We take this as evidence that low-pitch regions are real prosodic features.

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Bibliographic reference.  Ward, Nigel (1999): "Low-pitch regions as dialogue signals? Evidence from dialog-act and lexical correlates in natural conversation", In DIAPRO-1999, 83-88.