Backchannels across cultures: A study of Americans and Japanese

Abstract

ABSTRACT The frequency of listener responses, calledbackchannels, was studied in English conversations within and across two cultural groups: Americans from the midwestern United States and Japanese who were born and raised in Japan. The findings reveal that backchannels of several types are displayed far more frequently by Japanese listeners. This appears to be related to the greater use by Japanese of certain discourse constructions that favor backchannels, and to the Japanese culture. The Japanese listening style remains unchanged in cross-cultural conversations, but Americans alter listening style in the direction of their non-native interlocutors. The study found no evidence for the hypothesis that backchanneling conventions that are not shared contribute to negative personality attributions or stereotyping. (Conversational analysis, intercultural communication, Japanese and American English discourse)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 211 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.