Cues to perceived functions of acted and spontaneous feedback expressions

We present a two step study where the first part aims to determine the phonemic prior bias (conditioned on “ah”, “m-hm”, “m-m”, “n-hn”, “oh”, “okay”, “u-hu”, “yeah” and “yes”) in subjects perception of six feedback functions (acknowledgment, continuer, disagreement, surprise, enthusiasm and uncertainty). The results showed a clear phonemic prior bias for some tokens, e.g “ah” and “oh” is commonly interpreted as surprise but “yeah” and “yes” less so. The second part aims to examine determinants to judged typicality, or graded structure, within the six functions of “okay”. Typicality was correlated to four determinants: prosodic central tendency within the function (CT); phonemic prior bias as an approximation to frequency instantiation (FI), the posterior i.e. CT x FI and judged Ideality (ID), i.e. similarity to ideals associated with the goals served by its function. The results tentatively suggests that acted expressions are more effectively communicated and that the functions of feedback to a greater extent constitute goal-based categories determined by ideals and to a lesser extent a taxonomy determined by CT and FI. However, it is possible to automatically predict typicality with a correlation of r = 0.52 via the posterior.