The prosody of Swedish conversational grunts

This paper explores conversational grunts in a face-to-face setting. The study investigates the prosody and turn-taking effect of fillers and feedback tokens that has been annotated for attitudes. The grunts were selected from the DEAL corpus and automatically annotated for their turn taking effect. A novel suprasegmental prosodic signal representation and contextual timing features are used for classification and visualization. Classification results using linear discriminant analysis, show that turn-initial feedback tokens lose some of their attitude-signaling prosodic cues compared to non-overlapping continuer feedback tokens. Turn taking effects can be predicted well over chance level, except Simultaneous Starts. However, feedback tokens before places where both speakers take the turn were more similar to feedback continuers than to turn initial feedback tokens.