Collaborative Signaling of Informational Structures by Dynamic Speech Rate.

The research reported in this article is an attempt to elucidate the functions of dynamic speech rates as contextualization cues in conversational Japanese. The article claims that changes in the speech rate in conversational Japanese have a definite potential for cuing the structure of information collaboratively constructed by participants of a conversation. When people engage in a conversation, they not only express, by means of uttering words and sentences, what they intend to get across to other conversants about the topics of discourse, but also express, both intentionally and unintentionally, messages concerned with the situation in which the conversation is taking place. This second type of expression in many ways directs how the first type of expression is to be interpreted by the conversants. The second type of expression is usually carried out through nonreferential and nonlexical means such as prosody, gestures/postures, gaze, and backchannels. Several sociolinguists introduced the notion of contextualization to capture these processes in everyday language use, and called the signals involved in expressions of the second type contextualization cues.