Inhalation noises, "ja" and laughter in a German dialogue corpus – Phonetic forms and their possible communicative functions
Sarah Cieslik, Oliver Gast, Bettina Köhler, Jürgen Trouvain
Among the most frequent paraverbal (or 'paralinguistic') vocalisations which are typical for spontaneous speech are various types of laughter as well as 'words' like and , different forms of , fillers like or and other forms of affective interjections. In this study we explore laughter, the 'word' (engl. , literally ) and audible inhalation as the three most prominent categories of vocalisation in a German corpus of spontaneous dialogues (IPDS 2006) (six conversations with two friends each (same sex), no visual contact, mean duration per dialogue: 11 minutes).