Listeners typically provide feedback while listening to a speaker in conversation and thereby engage in the co-construction of the interaction. We analyze the influence of the listener on the speaker by investigating how her verbal feedback signals help in modeling the speaker's language. We find that feedback from the listener may help in modeling the speaker's language, whether through the listener's feedback as transcribed, or the acoustic signal directly. We find the largest positive effects for end of sentence as well as for pauses mid-utterance, but also effects that indicate we successfully model elaborations of ongoing utterances that may result from the presence or absence of listener feedback.
Cite as: Baumann, T. (2020) How a Listener Influences the Speaker. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 970-974, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-198
@inproceedings{baumann20b_speechprosody,
author={Timo Baumann},
title={{How a Listener Influences the Speaker}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={970--974},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-198}
}