In this study, we investigate syntactic and prosodic features of the speaker's speech at points where turn-taking and backchannels occur, on the basis of our analysis of Japanese spontaneous dialogs. Specifically, we focus on features such as part of speech, duration, F0 contour pattern, relative height of the peak F0, energy trajectory pattern, and relative height of the peak energy at the final part of speech segments. We examine, first, the relationship between turn-taking/backchannels and each feature of speech segments independently, showing that the features examined in this study are all related to turn-taking or backchannels and that the way they correlate is fairly consistent with previous studies. Next, we explore the inter-relationship among the features with respect to turn-taking and backchannels. We show that in both turn-taking and backchannels, (1) some instances of syntactic features make extremely strong contributions, and (2) in general, syntax has a stronger contribution than any individual prosodic feature, although the whole prosody contributes as strongly as, or even more strongly than, syntax. We also discuss some implications of our results, comparing them with previous models that have mentioned roles of syntax and prosody in turn-taking and backchannels.

The balanced corpus of contemporary written Japanese (BCCWJ) is Japan's first 100 million words balanced corpus. It consists of three subcorpora (publication subcorpus, library subcorpus, and special-purpose subcorpus) and covers a wide range of text registers including books in general, magazines, newspapers, governmental white papers, best-selling books, an internet bulletinboard, a blog, school textbooks, minutes of the national diet, publicity newsletters of local governments, laws, and poetry verses. A random sampling technique is utilized whenever possible in order to maximize the representativeness of the corpus. The corpus is annotated in terms of dual POS analysis, document structure, and bibliographical information. The BCCWJ is currently accessible in three different ways including Chunagon a web-based interface to the dual POS analysis data. Lastly, results of some pilot evaluation of the corpus with respect to the textual diversity are reported. The analyses include POS distribution, word-class distribution, entropy of orthography, sentence length, and variation of the adjective predicate. High textual diversity is observed in all these analyses.

We examined whether filled pauses (FPs) affect listeners' predictions about the complexity of upcoming phrases in Japanese. Studies of spontaneous speech corpora show that constituents tend to be longer or more complex when they are immediately preceded by FPs than when they are not. From this finding, we hypothesized that FPs cause listeners to expect that the speaker is going to refer to something that is likely to be expressed by a relatively long or complex constituent. In the experiments, participants listened to sentences describing both simple and compound shapes on a computer screen. Their task was to press a button as soon as they had identified the shape corresponding to the description. Phrases describing shapes were immediately preceded by a FP, a silent pause of the same duration, or no pause. We predicted that listeners' response times to compound shapes would be shorter when there is a FP before phrases describing the shape than when there is no FP, because FPs are good cues to complex phrases, whereas response times to simple shapes would not be shorter with a preceding FP than without. The results of native Japanese and proficient non-native Chinese listeners agreed with the prediction and provided evidence to support the hypothesis. Response times of the least proficient non-native listeners were not affected by the existence of FPs, suggesting that the effects of FPs on non-native listeners depend on their language proficiency.

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