Backchannel responses in Hungarian conversations: a corpus-based study on the effect of the partner’s age and gender

Backchannel responses (BChs) have been an important research topic in conversation analysis since Yngve (1970) drew a distinction between speech produced by the person holding the turn and talking in the ‘main’ channel, while the listener occupying the ‘back’ channel of the communication. However, much less is known about the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of BChs. The aim of the present study is twofold: 1. it seeks to provide a general analysis of BChs as a formal group in 10 Hungarian conversations, using a formal, phonetic approach. 2. Additionally, another sub-study was conducted concerning the contextual variability of BChs investigating their change, according to the age of the conversation partner in three-party conversations. The age of the subject did not significantly affect the frequency and duration of the fieldworker1’s BCh or the other acoustic parameters, however it did make some difference in pause patterns. In contrast, gender-related changes were detected in the fieldworker1’s utterance: having produced more BChs when talking to older women. This may be explained by the possible intimacy in female conversations as well as by the influence of politeness. The results might offer new insights of the conversation’s structure with regard to their age and gender.