Some Exotic Discourse Markers Of Spoken Dialog

e) after 350ms wait you should produce back-channel feedback. Our model for English is the same except for some parameters: pitch level (clause a) 26th-percentile, recovery time (clause d) 800ms, and delay (clause e) 700ms. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Back-channel feedback, also called "listener responses'~ is, to a first approximation, those responses produced by one participant which do not interfere with utterances by the other participant. In American English yeah , m m and uh h u h are typical backchannel feedback. In Japanese u n is most typical. This paper summarizes some findings on backchannels and their cues, as primitive examples of discourse markers in spoken dialog. Definitions, details, discussion, and references appear elsewhere (Ward 1996; ~Vard 1998; Ward & Tsukahara to appear: ~vVard submitted; Ward & Tsukahara 1998). The findings arose from our corpora of unrestricted twoperson conversations in Japanese and in American English, and might not apply to ta,sk-directed discourses, small talk, multi-party conversations, and conversations with audiences. 2 A Cue for Back-channel Feedback In Japanese and in English, the prosody of the speaker's utterances can mark times when the listener is welcome to produce back-channel feedback. One specific cue is a region of low pitch. Behavior of Japanese listeners can be modeled with the following