YEAH, uh-huh, right. A listener will utter these little words many times during a conversation, and a prime cue for them may be a drop in the pitch of the speaker's voice.
Almost a fifth of our utterances are "backchannels"small words that often serve as information receipts, acknowledging we have heard what another person has said. Researchers have long suspected that speakers somehow prompt listeners when to utter backchannels, but what these prompts are has been unclear.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo, Japan, recorded informal conversations in both English and Japanese. They then used statistical methods to fish out patterns of speech that correlated with backchannelling. "We're interested in the pacing of conversation," says the team leader, Nigel Ward. "We looked for cues that tell one person to speak, or to shut up, or to say uh-huh."
In both languages, the scientists found that listeners tend to backchannel when ...