Bottom-up discovery of structure and variation in response tokens (‘backchannels’) across diverse languages

Abstract

Response tokens (also known as backchannels, continuers, or feedback) are a frequent feature of human interaction, where they serve to display understanding and streamline turn-taking. We propose a bottom-up method to study responsive behaviour across 16 languages (8 language families). We use sequential context and recurrence of turns formats to identify candidate response tokens in a language-agnostic way across diverse conversational corpora. We then use UMAP clustering directly on speech signals to represent structure and variation. We find that (i) written orthographic annotations underrepresent the attested variation, (ii) distinctions between formats can be gradient rather than discrete, (iii) most languages appear to make available a broad distinction between a minimal nasal format ‘mm’ and a fuller ‘yeah’-like format. Charting this aspect of human interaction contributes to our understanding of interactional infrastructure across languages and can inform the design of speech technologies.

Communicative Feedback in Response to Children’s Grammatical Errors

“…Finally, the current analysis was only based on children learning English. Evidence suggests that communicative feedback signals such as clarification requests Lustigman & Clark, 2019;Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984) and acknowledgements (Cutrone, 2005;Liesenfeld & Dingemanse, 2022;Maynard, 1990) are universally used in human conversations, and can therefore be leveraged by children from different languages and cultures. Future work is required to investigate this hypothesis.…”

Communicative Feedback in language acquisition

“…They rely on fundamental properties of human communication (H. H. Clark, 1996;Pickering & Garrod, 2021), making them much more likely to be universal across cultures. There is indeed accumulating evidence that feedback signals of the sort described above are present in a diversity of languages and cultures (although not always studied in the context interaction with children), such as for acknowledgements (Cutrone, 2005;Liesenfeld & Dingemanse, 2022;Maynard, 1990), communicative repair (Dingemanse et al, 2015;Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984;Schegloff, 2006), and time-contingent responses (Bornstein et al, 1992;Richman et al, 1992).…”

Communicative Feedback in Language Acquisition

“…They rely on fundamental properties of human communication (H. H. Clark, 1996;Pickering & Garrod, 2021), making them much more likely to be universal across cultures. There is indeed accumulating evidence that feedback signals of the sort described above are present in a diversity of languages and cultures (although not always studied in the context interaction with children), such as for acknowledgements (Cutrone, 2005;Liesenfeld & Dingemanse, 2022;Maynard, 1990), communicative repair (Dingemanse et al, 2015;Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984;Schegloff, 2006), and time-contingent responses (Bornstein et al, 1992;Richman et al, 1992).…”