Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Edioic responses abound in dialogues, where a speaker reuses a portion of the text uttered by another in a preceding turm, though semantically they contribute little if any new information. The phenomenon has attracted the attention of researchers from diverse academic fields, ranging from sociolinguistics and developmental psychology, to computational linguistics and human-computer interfaces. This study reports an empirical investigation on echoic responses from an informational perspective. Drawing on statistical analyses of instances extracted from corpora of spoken dialogues in Japanese, we show that echoic responses with different timings, lengths, intonations, pitches, and speeds signal different degrees in which the speakers have integrated the repeated information into their prior knowledge. We further consider dialogue-coordination functions enacted by this informational potential of echoic responses, and identify the function of display as distinguished from the functions of acknowledgment and repair-initiation.