Backchannelling across Languages: Rate, Lexical Choice and Intonation in L1 Italian, L1 German and L2 German

Sbranna, Simona; Möking, Eduardo; Wehrle, Simon; Grice, Martine

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2022-149

Cited by 7 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…We utilize a slightly different terminology in this study (‘passive recipiency’ is used for backchannel signals and ‘turn initialization’ is used for turn-claiming signals), aligning with more prevalent terms found in the literature, e.g. [ 73 , 74 ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic differences between affirmative and feedback head nods in German Sign Language (DGS): A pose estimation study

Bauer,

Kuder,

Schulder

et al. 2024

PLoS ONE

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This study investigates head nods in natural dyadic German Sign Language (DGS) interaction, with the aim of finding whether head nods serving different functions vary in their phonetic characteristics. Earlier research on spoken and sign language interaction has revealed that head nods vary in the form of the movement. However, most claims about the phonetic properties of head nods have been based on manual annotation without reference to naturalistic text types and the head nods produced by the addressee have been largely ignored. There is a lack of detailed information about the phonetic properties of the addressee’s head nods and their interaction with manual cues in DGS as well as in other sign languages, and the existence of a form-function relationship of head nods remains uncertain. We hypothesize that head nods functioning in the context of affirmation differ from those signaling feedback in their form and the co-occurrence with manual items. To test the hypothesis, we apply OpenPose, a computer vision toolkit, to extract head nod measurements from video recordings and examine head nods in terms of their duration, amplitude and velocity. We describe the basic phonetic properties of head nods in DGS and their interaction with manual items in naturalistic corpus data. Our results show that phonetic properties of affirmative nods differ from those of feedback nods. Feedback nods appear to be on average slower in production and smaller in amplitude than affirmation nods, and they are commonly produced without a co-occurring manual element. We attribute the variations in phonetic properties to the distinct roles these cues fulfill in turn-taking system. This research underlines the importance of non-manual cues in shaping the turn-taking system of sign languages, establishing the links between such research fields as sign language linguistics, conversational analysis, quantitative linguistics and computer vision.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic differences between affirmative and feedback head nods in German Sign Language (DGS): A pose estimation study

Bauer,

Kuder,

Schulder

et al. 2024

PLoS ONE

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“…The categorical analysis not only facilitates detecting and describing overarching patterns of prosodic realisation, but also makes it possible to explicitly account for the potentially distinct status of level (or flat) intonation contours (cf. Grice et al, 2017;Sbranna et al, 2022;Wehrle et al, 2023b).…”

Section: Intonational Realisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We then used a custom Praat script to extract pitch values at 10% and 90% of token duration and calculated the difference between those values in semitones (STs; with a reference value of 1 Hz) (cf. Ha et al, 2016;Sbranna et al, 2022;Wehrle et al, 2023b). If there was no pitch information available at either one of these time points (usually because there were unvoiced segments at the edges or because non-modal voice quality was used), the point of extraction was moved by 10%, yielding, for example, 20%-90% or 10%-80% windows.…”

Section: Data and Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, genau ('exactly') was used far more frequently in the speech of instruction givers compared with followers, across groups (ASD: followers 2.3%givers 21.5%; CTR: followers 5%givers 23.5%). This was compensated for with a decrease of ja ('yes/yeah') and mmhm, while the proportion of okay remained more or less constant (in both groups; more details in Wehrle, 2021; see also Janz, 2022;Sbranna et al, 2023). The most obvious explanation is that genau ('exactly') is likely to be an appropriate choice for a speaker who possesses, provides and, crucially, confirms information regarding the route and landmarks, but less so for an instruction follower (and vice versa for the non-lexical BC type mmhm).…”

Section: Speaker Roles and Dialogue Stagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Backchannels in conversations between autistic adults are less frequent and less diverse prosodically and lexically

2023

Self Cite

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Backchannels (BCs; listener signals such as ‘mmhm’ or ‘okay’) are a ubiquitous and essential feature of spoken interaction. They are used by listeners predominantly to support the ongoing turn of their interlocutor and to signal understanding and agreement. Listeners seem to be highly sensitive to the exact realisations of BCs and to judge deviations from typical forms as negative. Very little is known about the use of BCs by speakers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In dialogue recordings of 28 German adults in two groups of disposition-matched dyads (i.e., both interlocutors were either autistic or non-autistic), we found that the ASD group was characterised by (1) a lower rate of BCs per minute (particularly in the early stages of conversation), (2) less diversity in the lexical realisation of BCs and (3) a less diverse and flexible mapping of different intonation contours to different BC types. We interpret these results as reflecting more general characteristics of autistic as compared to non-autistic individuals, namely different strategies in signalling attention towards an interlocutor and less flexible behaviour in social interaction.

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“…For example, an intonation contour ending in a decrease in pitch and intensity can signal that the speaker has finished and is ready to yield the turn (Hirschberg et al., 2020; Ward, 2019). Speakers can also use prosody to provide feedback that they are listening, with either falling or rising intonation used in short utterances such as mhmm or yes , which are commonly referred to as backchannels (Savino, 2014; Sbranna et al., 2022; Wehrle et al., 2023).…”

Section: Prosody and Its Functionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic prosody in autism spectrum disorder—An overview

Grice,

Wehrle,

Krüger

et al. 2023

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Linguistic prosody involves the rhythm and melody of speech. It implicitly enhances or modifies the explicit meaning of spoken words. The literature on linguistic prosody related to autism spectrum disorder deals both with the production and perception of a broad range of linguistic functions. These functions range from the formal encoding of grammatical features (e.g. lexical stress, syntactic structure) to the less formal, more intuitive signalling of pragmatic or interactional aspects (speech acts, information structure, turn‐taking in conversation). This narrative review reports mixed results from 51 studies, with tentative evidence for greater differences in the perception of intuitive functions. Apart from considerable methodological differences across the different studies, much of the variability in the results is due to the wide range of ages investigated, since difficulties encountered by autistic children do not always persist into adulthood and compensatory strategies can be learnt for using prosody in communication.

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Backchannelling across Languages: Rate, Lexical Choice and Intonation in L1 Italian, L1 German and L2 German

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Phonetic differences between affirmative and feedback head nods in German Sign Language (DGS): A pose estimation study

Phonetic differences between affirmative and feedback head nods in German Sign Language (DGS): A pose estimation study

Backchannels in conversations between autistic adults are less frequent and less diverse prosodically and lexically

Linguistic prosody in autism spectrum disorder—An overview

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