Informational and dialogue-coordinating functions of prosodic features of Japanese echoic responses

摘要

Echoic responses, which reuse portions of the texts uttered in the preceding turns, about in dialogues, although semantically they contribute little new information. In this paper, we attempt to identify the information and dia- logue-coordinating functions of Japanese echoic responses while focusing on their prosodic and temporal features. Toward this goal, we conducted an observational study based on a corpus of spoken dialogues, as well as three Complementary experiments, where particular prosodic/temporal features of echoic responses were studied in a con- Trolled and focused manner.