Addressee backchannels steer narrative development

Brief addressee responses such as uh huh, oh, and wow, which are called backchannels, are typically considered reactive phenomena – devices that respond in various ways to what was just said. Addressees, in providing backchannels, actively shape story telling in spontaneous dialogue (Bavelas et al., 2000). We contrasted generic backchannels with context-sensitive specific backchannels within a collection of face-to-face dialogues and in a narrative completion experiment. The analysis demonstrates that storytellers respond in distinct patterns to the two categories of backchannels. After generic backchannels, they provide discourse-new events. After specific backchannels, they provide elaborative information on previously presented events. Results from an experiment support this analysis, indicating that people reading transcripts of the conversation predict a similar pattern of story continuation following generic versus specific backchannels. We conclude that addressee responses are not only reactive, but proactive and collaborative in the shaping of narrative.