Prosodic cues to agreement and disagreement prefaces in Austrian German conversations

While the expression of speaker alignment has been of interest in Conversation Analysis for decades, the prosody of (dis)agreement has so far only received little attention. This is the first investigation of the timing of agreement and disagreement turns in conversational Austrian German and the prosody of prefaces to these turns. To assess the timing and prosody, we extracted the duration of the pause before the (dis)agreeing turn, the duration of the preface, examined its F0 shape and performed linear and logistic regression analyses to estimate the relationship of these features with (dis)agreement. We find that agreement prefaces tend to be short and uttered after a short pause. Prefaces to straightforward disagreements are also produced after a short pause but tend to be long. Prefaces to a sub-category of disagreeing turns (“yes you’re right, but…”) tend to be long and uttered after a long pause. Various F0 shapes occur in all three types of prefaces, but there is a robust relationship between dip-rises and prefaces to straightforward disagreements. While the timing patterns are in line with previous findings in the literature on speaker alignment, we did not find unique F0 patterns for agreement or disagreement.