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

An Experimental Study on the Informational and Grounding Functions of prosodic Features of Japanese Echoic Responses

Atsushi Shimojima, Yasuhiro Katagiri, Hanae Koiso, and Marc Swerts

(1) Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
(2) ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan
(3) The National Language Research Institute, Japan
(4) IPO, Center for Research on User-System Interaction, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Echoic responses, which reuse portions of the texts uttered in the preceding turns, abound in dialogues, although semantically they contribute little new information. Earlier, we conducted a corpus-based analysis on echoic responses occurring in real-life dialogues, and examined their informational and dialogue-coordinating functions in connection with their temporal/prosodic features. The present study attempts to complement this observational approach with an experimental approach, where particular prosodic/temporal features of echoic responses can be studied in a more controlled and focused manner. In combination, the two lines of analyses provide an evidence that (1) echoic responses with different timings, intonations, pitches, and speeds signal different degrees in which the speakers have integrated the repeated information into their prior knowledge, and (2) the dialogue-coordinating functions of echoic responses vary with the speaker's integration rates signaled by these prosodic/temporal cues.

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Bibliographic reference.  Shimojima, Atsushi / Katagiri, Yasuhiro / Koiso, Hanae / Swerts, Marc (1999): "An experimental study on the informational and grounding functions of prosodic features of Japanese echoic responses", In DIAPRO-1999, 187-192.