84:, defining a listener's comprehension and/or interest. In other words the term "backchannel" is used to differentiate between the roles of the people involved in a conversation. The person doing the speaking is thought to be communicating through the "front channel" while the person doing the listening is thought to be communicating through the "backchannel." The term "backchannel" does not necessarily define the listener's role in the conversation but helps us to understand how the person that is taking on the role of the listener responds to the person taking on the role of the speaker. Recent research, which can be seen below, has also suggested new terms for these two functions. They have proposed the term
68:'uh-huh' without relinquishing the turn." Backchannel responses are a part of basic human interaction because to have a productive or meaningful person-person interaction humans must cooperate with one another when participating in a conversation. Meaning, when two people are involved in a conversation, at any given moment only one person is primarily speaking and the other is primarily listening, yet the listener is often giving minor messages through backchannel responses.
43:, primarily serving a social or meta-conversational purpose, such as signifying the listener's attention, understanding, sympathy, or agreement, rather than conveying significant information. Examples of backchanneling in English include such expressions as "yeah", "OK", "uh-huh", "hmm", "right", and "I see".
207:
require a context where the speaker is responding to something exasperating or frustrating. In both of these cases, Goodwin argues that the backchannels focus only on addressing some aspect of the immediately proceeding utterance rather than the larger conversation itself. They can appear both in the
103:
Usually, the way backchannel is used would be a person telling a story or explaining something to one or more individuals, involved in a conversation, who would respond to them with short verbal messages or non-verbal body language. In order to indicate that they are listening and paying attention to
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in 1970, in the following passage: "In fact, both the person who has the turn and his partner are simultaneously engaged in both speaking and listening. This is because of the existence of what I call the back channel, over which the person who has the turn receives short messages such as 'yes' and
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In 2017, Kyoto
University's Graduate program of Informatics began developing a robot to assist individuals, more specifically the elderly, with mental health through the use of attentive listening. They utilized backchannel generation as a method for the robot to have some form of feedback to feel
116:
Backchannel responses can show that the listener understands, agrees, is surprised by, is angered by, and more by what the speaker is saying. Backchannel communication is present in all cultures and languages, though frequency and use may vary. For example, backchannel responses are not only a key
251:
In 1997 there was a study on 205,000 telephone utterances that showed 19% of those constituted a "backchannel". This study was a part of a new method of "discourse detection" and "statistical modeling" that allowed them to have such a large sample size, giving the possibility of generalizing this
121:
encounter if participants from both parties are not accustomed to the same backchannel norms. Studies have shown that when people learn a second language they learn or adapt to how people that are native speakers of that language use backchannel responses. This may occur in terms of the frequency
239:
They concluded that the responses from the distracted listeners included significantly fewer specific responses than from the undistracted listeners. In addition, they found that the quality of the narration was dramatically lower when the listener was distracted. Their basic contention was that
235:
They transcribed students telling a fellow participant about a close call experience that they had had. With one group of participants, they had the listener perform another task to distract them from the story being told. The researchers asked independent reviewers to code the verbal and visual
155:
serve this role. Non-lexical backchannels generally come from a limited set of sounds not otherwise widely used in content-bearing conversational speech; as a result, they can be used to express support, surprise, or a need for clarification at the same time as someone else's conversational turn
220:, Coates, and Johnson put forth evidence that listeners' responses help shape the content of the speaker's utterances. They grouped acknowledgment tokens into two categories: generic and specific. Generic responses could be considered backchannels and would include
48:
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Li, Han. "Patterns of
Backchannel Responses in Canadian-Chinese Conversations" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, San Francisco, CA, May 23, 2007 <Not Available>. 2009-02-04
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operating simultaneously during a conversation. The predominant channel is that of the speaker who directs primary speech flow. The secondary channel of communication (or backchannel) is that of the listener which functions to provide
117:
component of oral languages but they are also important in sign languages. Another example is
Germans produce smaller backchannel responses and use back channel responses less frequently. Confusion or distraction can occur during an
107:
In recent years, scholars have challenged the mainstream definition by adding the "optionality" in the definition of "backchannel". The use of backchannel is never necessary and is always a supplement to a pre-existing conversation.
47:
243:
Tolins and
Foxtree have also published research demonstrating how backchannel communication influences speakers. Their research was specifically looking at how speakers respond to generic responses compared to specific responses.
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the speaker, they might produce sounds as "right", "yeah", etc. or give a nod. Such acknowledgments or small gestures help the speaker understand that the listeners are interested and that they should go on with their story.
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Research in recent years has expanded the set of recognized backchannel responses to include sentence completions, requests for clarification, brief statements, and non-verbal responses. These have been categorised as
49:
143:
A non-lexical backchannel is a vocalized sound that has little or no referential meaning but still verbalizes the listener's attention, and that frequently co-occurs with gestures. In
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listeners are co-narrators and help the storyteller in his or her narration. In other words, a storyteller tells a better story with an audience that is engaged than one that is not.
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is generally used as a backchannel to signal that the speaker is yielding their conversational turn and allowing the other speaker to maintain control of the conversational floor.
783:
Jurafsky, Daniel; Bates, Rebecca; Coccaro, Noah; Martin, Rachel; Meteer, Marie; Ries, Klaus; Shriberg, Elizabeth; Stolcke, Andreas; Taylor, Paul; Van Ess-Dykema, Carol (1997).
203:, where use of the backchannel requires a specific conversational context where something unexpected or surprising was said. Similarly, more substantive backchannels such as
199:
One of the conversational functions of phrasal backchannels is to assess or appraise a previous utterance. Goodwin argues that this is the case for the phrasal backchannel
554:
Young, Richard F. and Jina Lee. "Identifying units in interaction: Reactive tokens in Korean and
English conversations." Journal of Sociolinguistics (2004): 380-407.
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responses of the narration events as generic or specific. They also asked other independent reviewers to gauge the quality of the narration in each case.
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Ward, Nigel G. and Yaffa Al
Bayyari. "American and Arab Perceptions of an Arabic Turn-Taking Cue." Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (2010): 270-275.
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Research in 2000 has pushed back on the notion of backchannels, in which the listener's role is merely to receive information provided by the speaker.
50:
505:
Iwasaki, S. (1997). "The
Northridge earthquake conversations: The floor structure and the 'loop' sequence in Japanese conversation".
285:
Yngve, Victor. "On getting a word in edgewise," page 568. Papers from the Sixth
Regional Meeting Chicago Linguistic Society, 1970.
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occurs when one participant is speaking and another participant interjects responses to the speaker. A backchannel response can be
175:, as well as for single-syllable backchanneling. In a study examining the use of two-syllable backchannels that focused on
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Lala, Divesh; Milhorat, Pierrick; Inoue, Koji; Ishida, Masanari; Takanashi, Katsuya; Kawahara, Tatsuya (August 2017).
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White, Sheida. "Backchannels across cultures: A study of
Americans and Japanese ." Language in society (1989): 59-76.
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being used more productively as a continuer, a weak acknowledgment token, and a weak assessment marker. In contrast,
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Heinz, Bettina (2002-11-20). "Backchannel responses as strategic responses in bilingual speakers' conversations".
628:
Goodwin, Charles (1986). "Between and within: Alternative sequential treatments of continuers and assessments".
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Mesch, Johanna (2016-09-28). "Manual backchannel responses in signers' conversations in
Swedish Sign Language".
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Arnold, Kyle (2013-10-31). "Humming Along: The Meaning of Mm-Hmm in Psychotherapeutic Communication".
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228:, while specific responses would involve a reaction to the given content. Examples might include
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748:"Attentive listening system with backchanneling, response generation and flexible turn-taking"
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Gardner, Rod (1997). "The Conversation Object Mm: A Weak and Variable Acknowledging Token".
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163:, or repetition, of syllables within a non-lexical backchannel, such as in responses like
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Bavelas, Janet B.; Coates, Linda; Johnson, Trudy (2000). "Listeners as Co-Narrators".
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Bavelas, Janet B.; Coates, Linda; Johnson, Trudy (2000). "Listeners as Co-Narrators".
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like a real conversation. Further research is being conducted to be more practical.
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that a person produces backchannel responses or what those responses sound like.
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middle of extended talk as well as at the end of longer conversational turns.
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Ward, Nigel (2006). "Non-lexical conversational sounds in American English".
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The term "backchannel" was designed to imply that there are two channels of
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Listener responses that can be both verbal and non-verbal in nature
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dialog fragment with backchannels: "... yeah ... yeah, yeah ..."
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IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding
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English corpus linguistics: studies in honour of Jan Svartvik
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395:Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
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