Visualization to support the discovery of prosodic contours related to turn-taking

Some meaningful prosodic patterns can be usefully represented with pitch contours, however the development of such descriptions is a labor-intensive process. To assist in the discovery of contours, visualization tools may be helpful. [Edlund et al., 2009] presented the idea of superimposing hundreds of pitch curves from a corpus as a way to see the overall patterns. In this paper we refine and extend this method and illustrate its utility in the discovery of a prosodic cue to back-channels in Chinese. We also discuss issues in relating a contour-based description to one in terms of a conjunction of featues, and illustrate this with a prosodic cue to back-channels in Spanish