An Experimental Study on the Informational and Grounding Functions of Prosodic Features of Japanese Echoic Responses

Echoic responses, which reuse portions of the texts uttered in the preceding turns, abound in dialogues, although semantically they contribute little new information. Earlier, we conducted a corpus-based analysis on echoic responses occurring in real-life dialogues, and examined their informational and dialogue-coordinating functions in connection with their temporal/prosodic features. The present study attempts to complement this observational approachwith an experimental approach, where particular prosodic/temporal features of echoic responses can be studied in a more controlled and focused manner. In combination, the two lines of analyses provide an evidence that (1) echoic responses with different timings, intonations, pitches, and speeds signal different degrees in which the speakers have integrated the repeated information into their prior knowledge, and (2) the dialogue-coordinating functions of echoic responses vary with the speaker's integration rates signaled by these prosodic/temporal cues.