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Nasalization in Japanese Back-Channels bears Meaning

Many back-channels seem to be primarily sound-symbolic expressions, rather than fixed sequences of phonemes with arbitrarily associated meanings. The presence of a soundsymbolic meaning for one phonetic feature, nasalization, in back-channels in Japanese was investigated. Subjects were presented with tokens synthesized with and without nasalization and judged the differences in meaning for each pair. The results showed a fairly consistent meaning for nasalization, independent of the pragmatic context and of the phonetic context in which it occurred.