The prosody of backchannels in Slovak

This paper explores the prosodic realization of single affirmative cue words functioning as backchannels in cooperative task-oriented dialogues. It focuses on the comparison between four major lexical items signaling this meaning (mhm, no, uhhuh, áno) and compares the results with the realization of backchannels in a similar corpus of American English. Additionally, the entrainment properties of backchannels in terms of their similarity to the end of the preceding utterance in Slovak are examined. The results suggest that backchannels in Slovak are realized in a largely similar way to those in American English but with differences in intensity and duration when compared to acknowledgements and agreements. Slovak backchannels are also similar in slope and curvature of f0 contours to the ends of the turns preceding them.