Corpus-based Study on Non-vocal Sounds of Back-channels

uh, um, huh and mm are commonly used in people's daily conversation. Some non-vocal sounds are noticed to be used by Chinese English speakers in their conversations by retrieving SECCL (Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners). However, they do not use them often. The present paper, based on the retrieval of two self-built corpora relating to American and British movies, finds that the using frequencies of non-vocal sounds in America and Britain are comparatively higher than that in China. In terms of the using frequency of huh, Americans and British differ greatly, while the using frequencies of another three non-vocal sounds differ slightly. In addition, the present paper summarized the basic functions of these non-vocal sounds: answer mark, approach to assuage the embarrassment, illustration of individual's emotion, self-correction, follow-up, raising a question. The present paper can give a lesson to Chinese English speakers who relatively seldom use non-vocal sounds.