15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
Many back-channels seem to be primarily sound-symbolic expressions, rather than fixed sequences of phonemes with arbitrarily associated meanings. The presence of a sound-symbolic meaning for one phonetic feature, nasalization, in back-channels in Japanese was investigated. Subjects were presented with tokens synthesized with and without nasalization and judged the differences in meaning for each pair. The results showed a fairly consistent meaning for nasalization, independent of the pragmatic context and of the phonetic context in which it occurred.
Bibliographic reference. Ward, Nigel / Okamoto, Masafumi (2003): "Nasalization in Japanese back-channels bears meaning", In ICPhS-15, 635-638.