Cognitive aspects of communicating information with conversational fillers in Slovak

This paper reports on the form-function relationship of Slovak conversational fillers uh and mm in task-oriented dyadic spontaneous human-human conversations. The form is represented by two phonetic features: a discrete feature of nasality and a continuous feature of duration. The function is assessed on three dimensions critical for human-machine communicative systems: turn-taking management, (meta)cognitive state, and discourse and informational structure. We report that the two phonetic features facilitate partial disambiguation of communicative functions and discuss potential for applicability of our observations for human-machine interactive voice systems.

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