ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016

Quantitative Analysis of Backchannels Uttered by an Interviewer During Neuropsychological Tests

Gérard Bailly, Frédéric Elisei, Alexandra Juphard, Olivier Moreaud

This paper examines in detail the backchannels uttered by a French professional interviewer during a neuropsychological test of verbal memories. These backchannels are short utterances such as oui, d’accord, uhm, etc. They are mainly produced here to encourage subjects to retrieve a set of words after their controlled encoding. We show that the choice of lexical items, their production rates and their associated prosodic contours are influenced by the subject performance and conditioned by the protocol.