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Additional Information About American And Arab Perceptions Of An Arabic Turn-Taking Cue, Nigel Ward, Yaffa Al Bayyari

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

This technical report is a supplement to "American and Arab perceptions of an Arabic turn-taking cue", a paper submitted to the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. It provides additional details, discussion, figures, tables, and references relating to the main finding, that English speakers tend to misinterpret the prosodic pattern used in Arabic to cue back-channel responses, perceiving it as an expression of negative affect. It also describes an experimental demonstration that being able to detect and respond to this prosodic pattern in dialog can increase native-speaker perceptions of the social effectiveness of learners.