Response Behaviors in Conversational Speech among Japanese- and English-Speaking Parents and Their Toddlers

Abstract

The present study aimed at exploring the responses of listeners in conversational speech between parents and toddlers. Children's responses toward parents and parents' responses toward children were the focus of this study. Participants included ive dyads each of typically developing two-year-old toddlers and their parents from Japanese-and English-speaking families. Responses of a mother/father toward a child or a child toward a mother/father were classiied into three categories: non-lexical backchannels (e.g., hoo, nn, hai), phrasal backchannels (e.g., hontoo "really," soo desu ka "is that right?"), and repetition. The results showed that the average ratio of overall backchannels and repetitions produced by parents was quite similar in both languages and was much greater than that produced by children in both languages. Among Japanese-speaking parents, non-lexical backchannels and repetitions were preferred to phrasal backchannels, while among English-speaking parents non-lexical backchannels were most frequently used. With Japanese-speaking parents, almost half of the repetitions were exact repetitions.They frequently repeated what a child had said and added the sentence-inal particle "ne" or content words. These indings are expected to be useful in understanding response behaviors in spoken communication between parents and their children.

Socio-cultural perception of robot backchannels

“…Smaller differences between genders were also observed, in that Sri Lankan and Indian younger males produced more backchannels than female listeners, while the opposite was true for all three groups of older listeners and, to some extent, for the younger British English listeners. Yamashita (2017) investigated backchannels in English and Japanese parent-children conversations and found that the frequencies of backchannels were similar for the two settings, with the adults providing 5 (Japanese) to 14 (English) times more backchannels than the children. The distribution of forms of backchannels differed, with English parents using almost three times more phrasal backchannels than the Japanese, while the latter instead used many more repetitions.…”

“…A large number of studies have demonstrated that distribution and perception of backchannels differ between different cultures and languages ( White, 1989 ; Heinz, 2003 ; Cutrone, 2005 ; Mowlaei, 2017 ; Zellers, 2021 ) and that this may have consequences for intercultural conversation ( White, 1989 ; Wan, 2018 ; Najim and Muhammad, 2020 ), unless the interlocutors adapt to the general backchannel strategy of the language spoken ( Heinz, 2003 ; Cutrone, 2019 ). Other studies have shown that differences in the use and perception of backchannels are also related to gender ( Mulac et al., 1998 ; Stubbe, 1998 ; Ueno, 2008 ), age ( Yamashita, 2017 ; Kraaz and Bernaisch, 2022 ; Bodur et al., 2022 ) and familiarity with the speaker ( Bodur et al., 2022 ).…”

“…Backchannel responses ( Yngve, 1970 ), such as short verbal acknowledgements (e.g., “ uh-huh ”, “ mhm ”, “ yes ”) or non-verbal signals (e.g., head nods), are important in human conversations, as they indicate to the active speaker that the interlocutor is listening and following the line of reasoning, without having to resort to explicit requests for confirmation. Backchannels often come very natural in human-human conversations ( Jefferson, 1984 ; Jefferson, 1993 ), as children from a young age learn this interactive strategy ( Yamashita, 2017 ; Bodur et al., 2022 ) to signal either general attention (in which case they are provided at suitable opportunities given the speaker’s pauses or end of utterances) or receipt of specific information (in which case they follow directly after new, particularly important information) ( Cutrone, 2010 ). Backchannels are provided without interrupting the turn of the speaker and may overlap with the speaker’s utterances ( Jefferson, 1984 ; Jefferson, 1993 ; Heldner et al., 2013 ).…”