De Ruiter, Jan Peter. 2004. Response systems and signals of recipiency. In Asifa Majid (ed.), Field Manual Volume 9, 53-55. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

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The goal of this project is to gather cross cultural information on listeners’ feedback behavior during conversation. Listeners in a conversation usually provide short signals that indicate to the speaker that they are still “with the speaker”. These signals could be verbal (like for instance “mm hm” in English or “hm hm” in Dutch) or nonverbal (visual), like nodding. Often, these signals are produced in overlap with the speaker’s vocalization. If listeners do not produce these signals, speakers often invite them explicitly (e.g. “are you still there?” in a telephone conversation). Our goal is to investigate what kind of signals are used by listeners of different languages to signal “recipiency” to the speaker.