Abstract not found

Turn-taking is usually considered to follow a simple set of rules, enacted through a perhaps more complicated system of signals. The most significant aspect of the turn-taking process is that, in most cases, it proceeds in a very smooth fashion. Speakers signal to each other that they wish to either yield or take the turn through syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic means. In this paper, I explore how the turn-taking process develops in two different sets of Spanish conversations. In the first group of conversations, speakers take turns spontaneously, presumably as they would do in everyday situations. In the second group, turns were mechanically controlled, and communication was one-way. A comparison of the two types of conversation provides insights into the signals used in spontaneous turn-taking.

We present a series of studies of affirmative cue words—a family of cue words such as “okay ” or “alright " that speakers use frequently in conversation. These words pose a challenge for spoken dialogue systems because of their ambiguity: They may be used for agreeing with what the interlocutor has said, indicating continued attention, or for cueing the start of a new topic, among other meanings. We describe differences in the acoustic/prosodic realization of such functions in a corpus of spontaneous, task-oriented dialogues in Standard American English. These results are important both for interpretation and for production in spoken language applications. We also assess the predictive power of computational methods for the automatic disambiguation of these words. We find that contextual information and final intonation figure as the most salient cues to automatic disambiguation. 1.