Linguistic and non-verbal cues for the induction of silent feedback

The aim of this study is to analyze certain linguistic (dialogue acts, morphosyntactic units, semantics) and non-verbal cues (face, hand and body gestures) that may induce the silent feedback of a participant in face-to-face discussions. We analyze the typology and functions of the feedback expressions as attested in a corpus of TV interviews and then we move on to the investigation of the immediately preceding context to find systematic evidence related to the production of feedback. Our motivation is to look into the case of active listening by processing data from real dialogues based on the discourse and lexical content that induces the listener's reactions. © 2010 Springer-Verlag