Prosodic turn-yielding Cues with and without optical Feedback

Caroline Clemens and Christoph Diekhaus

SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2009)
Queen Mary University of London, September 11-12, 2009

Summary

The authors present a study of prosodic turn-taking indicators. The aim was to investigate whether some of the prosodic cues increase in quality or quantity if the optical feedback channel in the ver-bal conversation is missing. For the study we built up an experimental setup in which conversational partners held a conversation once with and once without an optical feedback channel. A detailed transcription of the recorded speech material was segmented into turns. In each turn the topic units were identified and the syllables were labeled. We measured and compared prosodic feature charac-teristics between turn-finale and turn-medial topic units.