The functions of active listening responses

In the literature, an interlocutor's active listening responses such as “hmh” are often defined as “continuers”, serving to prolong another interlocutor's turn. However, to date, experiments on the effect of non-interruptive active listening responses on a conversational partner's duration of talk have given contradictory results. Studies have shown one interlocutor's active listening responses to correlate sometimes with longer and sometimes with shorter turns of another interlocutor. To investigate this contradiction, the effect of a confederate's active listening on German participants' (N = 32) duration of speech was tested individually in an experiment simulating two significant conversational contexts extracted from the literature: explaining and socializing. The effect of active listening responses on the duration of talk interacted significantly with the conversational context. When socializing, the confederate's active listening led participants to talk longer. Whereas in the explanatory context, this effect was absent, indicating that the function of active listening responses is context-dependent.