A case study in the identification of prosodic cues to turn-taking: back-channeling in Arabic

Discovering and quantifying the prosodic signals that help manage turn-taking is difficult, in part because of the limitations of commonly used methods. This paper presents an integrated method that uses both perceptually-based analysis and quantitative analysis. The eight activities involved in the method — clarification of aims, problem formulation, corpus preparation, feature discovery, feature combination, hypothesis refinement, tuning, and evaluation — are illustrated using task of finding prosodic cues for back-channel feedback in Arabic.