ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Multimodality of Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1655049
This article is part of the Research TopicCognition at the Heart of Multimodal Interaction: Insights from Cognitivist and Interactionist ApproachesView all 4 articles
The speaker's "okay" vs. the listener's "okay": exploring lexical, phonetic, and multimodal variation of backchannels and fluencemes in conversation
Provisionally accepted
- 1Christian-Albrechts-Universitat zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany
- 2University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy
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This research explores the use of fluencemes and backchannels in German face-to-face conversations. Fluencemes are produced by the current speaker to facilitate speech planning and to structure the speaking turn, while backchannels are produced by the current listener to signal acknowledgment and understanding of what is being said. These two conversational devices are constituted by very short utterances, often sharing the same lexical form (e.g., "ja," "okay," "genau" in German); however, they display significant differences based on their function within the interaction. This study compares the distribution of backchannels and fluencemes within the conversational turn, their acoustic form, as well as their interaction with multimodal resources, across and within dyads. We find that, while the two devices share lexical candidates, their duration, F0 and pitch contour, as well as the frequency and type of co-occurring head movements vary depending on whether the item is produced by the speaker or by the listener.
Keywords: fluenceme, Backchannels, Feedback signals, Prosody, Head Movements, individual variation
Received: 27 Jun 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Böttcher and Rossi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Marlene Böttcher, mboettcher@isfas.uni-kiel.de
Martina Rossi, martina.rossi@uniurb.it
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