An analysis of turn-taking and backchannels based on prosodic and syntactic features in Japanese map task dialogs

In this study, we investigate syntactic and prosodic features of the speake r's speech at points where turn-taking and backchannels occur, on the basis of our analysis of Japanese spontaneous dialogs. Specifically, we focus on features such as part of speech, duration, F0 contour pattern, relative he ight of the peak F0, energy trajectory pattern, and relative height of the peak energy at the final part of speech segments. We examine, first, the re lationship between turn-taking/backchannels and each feature of speech segm ents independently, showing that the features examined in this study are al l related to turn-taking or backchannels and that the way they correlate is fairly consistent with previous studies. Next, we explore the inter-relati onship among the features with respect to turn-taking and backchannels. We show that in both turn-taking and backchannels, (I) some instances of synta ctic features make extremely strong contributions, and (2) in general, synt ax has a stronger contribution than any individual prosodic feature, althou gh the whole prosody contributes as strongly as, or even more strongly than , syntax. We also discuss some implications of our results, comparing them with previous models that have mentioned roles of syntax and prosody in tur n-taking and backchannels.