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Hesitation in Intercultural Communication: Some
Observations and Analyses on Interpreting Shoulder
Shrugging
Kristiina Jokinen
1
and Jens Allwood
2
1
Department of Speech Sciences, University of Helsinki
PO Box 9, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
Kristiina.Jokinen@helsinki.fi
2
SSKKII, University of Göteborg
Box 200, 405 30 Göteborg
jens@ling.gu.se
Abstract.
This paper concerns the different ways in which hesitation, and
hesitation related phenomena like uncertainty, doubt and other phenomena
where lack of knowledge is involved are expressed in different cultures. The
paper focuses especially on shoulder shrugging as a signal of hesitation or
uncertainty, and starts from the observation that shoulder shrugging has
different interpretations depending on the interlocutor's cultural background. It
is not commonly used in Eastern cultures while in Western cultures it is a sign
of uncertainty and ignorance. The paper reports a small study on the differences
in interpretation of a particular video tape gesture, and draws some preliminary
conclusions of how this affects intercultural communication between human
interlocutors and between humans and conversational agents.
Keywords:
hesitation signalling, gesturing, intercultural communication.
1 Introduction
Intercultural communication (ICC) is usually defined as communication between
people who do not have the same ethnic or national cultural background, e.g.
communication between a Chinese person and a German person (cf. [5], [1]). One of
the goals of the study of ICC is to discover similarities and differences in the way
people from different cultures communicate through cross-cultural comparative
studies. With this cross-cultural information as a background, it is then possible to
study whether and how such differences influence intercultural communication
between people who have different cultural backgrounds.
There are many types of studies of intercultural communication. The most common
type is questionnaire based cross-cultural studies of differences in attitudes and
values. Probably the most well known is the IBM-study reported by [5]. Another
approach is to observe people's communicative behaviour, based on audio or video
recordings of actual interactions in different cultures (leading to cross-cultural
comparison) or on recordings of intercultural interaction. This line of research ranges
