Formal and Functional study of Back Channel Responses in Persian

Although linguistic signs such as "hmm", "bale", "jeddan", "mm", occur frequently in conversation, they have not been studied linguistically up to now. These sounds, named back channel responses, influence the ongoing conversations. Back channel is a verbal or non-verbal response provided by the listener to show his/her participation, and though it seems to be insignificant communicatively, misunderstandings arise if they are misused. Therefore, their overlooking in conversation analysis has dramatic effects on the results obtained. This research studies back channel responses with respect to their form, function, degree of influence and prosodic features.