The Higgins Speech-fragments experiments is a series of experiments designed to investigate the use of small speech fregments in dialogue. These fragments may be grunts, singular words or short phrases, etc. They can be used to show that a listener is still paying attention (back-channeling), to signal agreement or disagreement, to signal understanding and to build mutual ground (feedback, grounding), etc.
The experiments will investigate properties such as prosody, timing, semantics. Production and perception experiments are planned, as well as behavioural studies in real human-computer dialogue.
Higgins Speech-fragments 1
The first experiment consists of a small series of tests designed to see under what circumstances people percieve one-word ellipses as confirmations of understanding, and when they are percieved as requests for clarification. The first dialogue below is an example of the former, the second exemplifies the latter.
| Speaker1 | I see a read building... |
| Speaker2 | Red? |
| Speaker1 | Yes, red. Behind it there is a park of some kind. |
| Speaker1 | I see a red building |
| Speaker2 | Mmm, red. |
| Speaker1 | ...and behind it there is a park of some kind. |
Copyright © 2002-2004 Jens Edlund, Gabriel Skantze and the members of the Center for Speech Technology
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