When the words are not everything: the use of laughter, fillers, back-channel, silence, and overlapping speech in phone calls

Original Research ARTICLE Front. ICT, 10 March 2015 | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fict.2015.00004 When the words are not everything: the use of laughter, fillers, back-channel, silence, and overlapping speech in phone calls Alessandro Vinciarelli1*, Paraskevi Chatziioannou1 and Anna Esposito2 1School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK 2Department of Psychology, Second University Naples, Caserta, Italy This article presents an observational study on how some common conversational cues – laughter, fillers, back-channel, silence, and overlapping speech – are used during mobile phone conversations. The observations are performed over the SSPNet Mobile Corpus, a collection of 60 calls between pairs of unacquainted individuals (120 subjects for roughly 12 h of material in total). The results show that the temporal distribution of the social signals above is not uniform, but it rather reflects the social meaning they carry and convey. In particular, the results show significant use differences depending on factors such as gender, role (caller or receiver), topic, mode of interaction (agreement or disagreement), personality traits, and conflict handling style