Informational and dialogue-coordinating functions of prosodic features of Japanese echoic responses

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

doi:10.1016/s0167-6393(01)00029-2

Cited by 26 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Part of the problem with the analysis of these kinds of data is that it is often not trivial to exactly define information status, and that some repeated materials strictly speaking may not represent ''given'' information. For instance, natural conversations abound with feedback cues in which a speaker repeats what the speaking partner just said in a previous turn, cases that one would normally not treat as ''genuine'' given information (see, e.g., the study by Shimojima, Katagiri, Koiso & Swerts, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic marking of information status in Dutch and Italian: a comparative analysis

Swerts

Krahmer

Avesani³

2002

Journal of Phonetics

Self Cite

135

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article reports on a comparative analysis of accentuation strategies within Italian and Dutch noun phrases (NPs). Its goal is not only to gain insight into what speakers do, but also into how listeners' perception and interpretation of incoming speech in different languages is affected by the distribution of accents. To this end, use is made of a particular experimental paradigm, which makes it possible to compare accent patterns in different languages from an acoustic, perceptual and functional point of view. Accent patterns were obtained via a simple dialogue game played by eight Dutch speakers and eight Italian ones. In this way, target descriptions of all speakers were obtained in the following four contexts: all new, single contrast in the adjective, single contrast in the noun, and double contrast. The accent patterns in these Dutch and Italian utterances were then compared in three different studies. Study 1 looks at accent distribution and finds that, in Dutch, new and contrastive information are accented, while given information is not; in Italian, distribution is not a significant factor in distinguishing information status, since within the elicited NPs both adjective and noun are always accented, irrespective of the status of the discourse context. Study 2 consists of prominence tests to investigate whether the accents differ in the degree of perceived emphasis. In Dutch, information status is reflected in these prominence differences: single contrastive accents are perceived to be the most emphatic, and given words the least emphatic. In Italian, it is less clear how gradient differences between accents can be linked to aspects of the discourse context. Study 3 presents a functional analysis of accent patterns exploring whether listeners are able to reconstruct a preceding utterance on the basis of prosodic properties of the current utterance.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic marking of information status in Dutch and Italian: a comparative analysis

Swerts

Krahmer

Avesani³

2002

Journal of Phonetics

Self Cite

135

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We analysed the number of words per trial, the duration (in seconds) per trial, and, based on these, we computed the speech rate (in number of words per second) per trial. Based on earlier research we expected the speech rate to go down after negative feedback (Krahmer et al, 2002;Shimojima et al, 2002), and this thus offers a manipulation check.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, referential communication is not always successful, which an addressee may indicate by responding to an initial description with negative, "go back" feedback. Various studies have revealed that negative feedback signals are marked, in that they are associated with more prosodic effort, for instance because they are realised with a higher pitch, longer duration and more pauses than comparable positive feedback signals (Krahmer et al, 2002;Shimojima et al, 2002). This makes intuitive sense, since it is more important for the speaker to pick up negative than positive feedback from the addressee.…”

Section: The Impact Of (Negative) Feedbackmentioning

confidence: 99%

On what happens in gesture when communication is unsuccessful

Hoetjes

Krahmer

Swerts

2015

Speech Communication

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

On what happens in gesture when communication is unsuccessfulHoetjes, Marieke; Krahmer, Emiel; Swerts, Marc General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. AbstractPrevious studies found that repeated references in successful communication are often reduced, not only at the acoustic level, but also in terms of words and manual co-speech gestures. In the present study, we investigated whether repeated references are still reduced in a situation when reduction would not be beneficial for the communicative situation, namely after the speaker receives negative feedback from the addressee. In a director-matcher task (experiment I), we studied gesture rate, as well as the general form of the gestures produced in initial and repeated references. In a separate experiment (experiment II) we studied whether there might (also) be more gradual differences in gesture form between gestures in initial and repeated references, by asking human judges which of two gestures (one from an initial and one from a repeated reference following negative feedback) they considered more precise. In both experiments, mutual visibility was added as a between subjects factor. Results showed that after negative feedback, gesture rate increased in a marginally significant way. With regard to gesture form, we found little evidence for changes in gesture form after negative feedback, except for a marginally significant increase of the number of repeated strokes within a gesture. Lack of mutual visibility only had a significant reducing effect on gesture size, and did not interact with repetition in any way. However, we did find gradual differences in gesture form, with gestures produced after negative feedback being judged as marginally more precise than initial gestures. The results from the present study suggest that in the production of unsuccessful repeated references, a process different from the reduction process as found in previous studies in repeated references takes place, with speakers appearing to put more effort into their gestures after negative feedback, as suggested by the data trending towards an increased gesture rate and towards gestures being judged as more precise after feedback.

show abstract

“…Fundamental frequency F0 is also shown to rise before pauses occurring in major syntactic boundaries, but not if the pause occurs elsewhere. In Japanese, [10] found that the prosodic and temporal features of a response carry information about how the speaker has grounded the information expressed in the partner's previous utterance, especially if the speaker repeats a portion of that utterance. The features such as longer delays, higher pitch, slower tempo, and rising boundary tone signal lower integration degree, i.e.…”

Section: Speech Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Hesitation in Intercultural Communication: Some Observations and Analyses on Interpreting Shoulder Shrugging

Jokinen

Allwood

2010

Culture and Computing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. This paper concerns the different ways in which hesitation, and hesitation related phenomena like uncertainty, doubt and other phenomena where lack of knowledge is involved are expressed in different cultures. The paper focuses especially on shoulder shrugging as a signal of hesitation or uncertainty, and starts from the observation that shoulder shrugging has different interpretations depending on the interlocutor's cultural background. It is not commonly used in Eastern cultures while in Western cultures it is a sign of uncertainty and ignorance. The paper reports a small study on the differences in interpretation of a particular video tape gesture, and draws some preliminary conclusions of how this affects intercultural communication between human interlocutors and between humans and conversational agents.

show abstract

Informational and dialogue-coordinating functions of prosodic features of Japanese echoic responses

Cited by 26 publications

References 6 publications

Prosodic marking of information status in Dutch and Italian: a comparative analysis

Prosodic marking of information status in Dutch and Italian: a comparative analysis

On what happens in gesture when communication is unsuccessful

Hesitation in Intercultural Communication: Some Observations and Analyses on Interpreting Shoulder Shrugging

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About