Speech is a fundamental means of communication that can be seen to provide
two channels for transmitting information: the lexical channel of which words
are said, and the non-lexical channel of how they are spoken. Both channels
shape listener expectations of upcoming communication; however, directly
quantifying their relative effect on expectations is challenging. Previous
attempts require spoken variations of lexically-equivalent dialogue turns or
conspicuous acoustic manipulations. This paper introduces a generalised
paradigm to study the value of non-lexical information in dialogue across
unconstrained lexical content. By quantifying the perceptual value of the
non-lexical channel with both accuracy and entropy reduction, we show that
non-lexical information produces a consistent effect on expectations of
upcoming dialogue: even when it leads to poorer discriminative turn judgements
than lexical content alone, it yields higher consensus among participants.

通过量化非词汇信息对对话期望的感知价值，本文展示非词汇信息在对未来对话的期望中产生一致影响，即使在与仅有词汇内容相比出现较差的鉴别性判断时，它也在参与者之间产生更高的共识。