Common Back-Channels


Dutch: hela, ja, jawel, nee, nou, okee, zo [1]

Egyptian Arabic: ah, mmm, laughter, tayeb, aiwa [5]

Italian: ah, mhm, mm, oh, si, uhuh [1]

Korean: mhm, n, ney, yeh, a, ah [6]

Mandarin Chinese: ao, ai, dui [4]

Swedish: ja, m, nä, va, nej, jo, jaha, aha, okej, just [2]


Sources

[1] Feedback in Second Language Acquisition, Jens Allwood. in Adult Language Acquisition: Cross Linguistic Perspectives, II: The Results, Clive Perdue, editor. pp 196-235. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[2] Investigating Communicative Feedback Phenomena across Languages and Modalities, Loredana Cerrato. KTH Ph.D. Thesis, 2007.

[3] Non-and Quasi-lexical Realizations of "Positive Response" in Korean, Polish, and Thai. Maciej Karpinski, Janusz Klesta, and Emilias Szalkowsa. in Speech Prosody 2006.

[4] English Backchannels in Mandarin Conversations: A case study of superstraum pragmatic `interference'. Hongyin Tao and Sandra A. Thompson. Journal of Pragmatics 16, pp 209-223. 1991.

[5] A Prosodic Feature that Invites Back-Channels in Egyptian Arabic. Nigel Ward and Yaffa Al Bayyari. to appear in Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, Volume XX, 2007.

[6] Identifying Units in Interaction: Reactive Tokens in Korean and English Conversations. Richard F. Young and Jina Lee. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8, 2004, pp 380-407.


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