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from linguistic-cultural studies to computational modelling of cultural behaviour
patterns and has become more common with video corpora being collected and easily
available for analysis. Usually, there are three different possible foci for such studies:
(i) differences in produced communicative behaviour, (ii) differences in interpretation
and understanding of the behaviour produced and (iii) studies of how context
influences the communicative behaviour produced or its interpretation. For instance,
[9] studied communicative behaviour of Finns and Estonians, and found differences
in speaking rate, length of pauses and turns, and interruptions. As she discussed the
differences in terms of high-context and low-context cultures ([4]), she concluded that
the communication even among people from neighbouring countries with closely
related languages like Finnish and Estonian can have differences that reflect cultural
differences: Estonian speakers show higher speech tempo, short pauses, and frequent
interruptions of interlocutors, which are claimed to be features of low-context
cultures, whereas Finnish speakers exhibit opposite features typical to high-context
cultures. [8], similarly, studied Finnish and English communication strategies from
the point of view of shared context and common ground, and noticed that
misinterpretations in various everyday dialogue situations depend on cultural
presuppositions of the interlocutors. This can be related to the continuum of high-
context vs. low-context cultures. They also pointed out that dialogue strategies are
learnt through interaction, they also involve presupposition, and that awareness of
cultural differences can help in avoiding miscommunication in ordinary activities
such as everyday conversations. In virtual agent technology, cultural differences have
been actively studied so as to produce appropriate behaviour in virtual conversational
agents, and computational models for culture specific communicative behaviour of
such agents have recently been built, see e.g. [6] and [3].
The three main foci of intercultural studies may be further subdivided in several
ways. For instance, the produced communicative behaviour may be divided in (i)
vocal (verbal and non-verbal), (ii) written (verbal and non-verbal e.g. pictures) and
(iii) body movements (verbal and non-verbal), depending on the medium in which the
communicative context is mediated. Interpretation may be subdivided in factual and
emotional interpretation and context can be subdivided into, for example, physical
setting and social setting. In this paper we are interested in body movement (shoulder
shrug) and its factual interpretation in a social context, and we assume that the type of
social setting is influenced by the social activity in which the interlocutors are
involved in.
The goal of this paper is to study the different ways in which phenomena like
hesitation, uncertainty, doubt and other phenomena where lack of knowledge is
involved are expressed in different cultures. We will refer to this as “hesitation related
phenomena”. We are also interested in how a given communicative behaviour - the
shoulder shrug (which in many Western cultures is used to express lack of
knowledge) - is interpreted by people with different cultural backgrounds. This
research is part of an on-going collaborative project between three universities in the
Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark), which also includes a larger
intercultural focus on bodily communication in different cultural settings (see more
information on the NOMCO-project at the project website: http://sskkii.gu.se/nomco).
In general, hesitation related phenomena can be expressed in a number of different
ways:
