Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1. Facial expression
2. Head movement
3. Shoulder movement
4. Prosody (e.g. lengthening or pausing)
5. Special words like
eh
or
hm
In the annotations of conversational speech, such phenomena as fillers (e.g. filled
pauses, discourse markers, editing terms, and parentheticals) and disfluencies are also
considered as hesitation markers, as well as self-corrections (repairs) and retractions
(reformulation or restart of one's utterance). Many of these phenomena have been
grouped under the heading “Own Communication Management” (OCM), see [2],
referring to their function when they are often simultaneously used to hold a turn and
to gain time for the speaker to choose how to continue speaking.
Some of the ways used to express hesitation seem very wide spread, some perhaps
even universal, while others are more specific to certain cultures. If we consider the
shoulder shrug, we can, for example, hypothesize that the following three functions
are good candidates for being universal; a shoulder shrug is produced, because of an
itch, a muscular discomfort, or psychological tension (e.g. a so called tick). The
interpretation of a shoulder shrug as lack of knowledge is, however, more uncertain
and is what this article represents an attempt to study.
In order to study the connection between shoulder shrugging and hesitation in a more
systematic way, especially the interpretation of shrugging as a sign of uncertainty, we
conducted a small empirical study using our recorded video data. We showed a video of
a shoulder shrug to people of different cultural background, and asked them to interpret
the gesture and tell us about their own use of a similar gesturing. The main purpose was
to get data on two aspects related to body movements as communicative signals: do
people notice certain kinds of body movements, and how do they interpret them in the
communicative context.
The article discusses the study and its findings, and is structured as follows. We
will present the video data and the setup for the questionnaire and interview study
conducted in Japan and Sweden in Section 2. In Section 3, we will first present the
results and observations, and then continue with the discussion of their interpretation
and significance in general. We will conclude and point to some future research lines
in Section 4.
2 Data
2.1 Video Clip
The particular shoulder shrug that prompted the study occurs in a video clip that is
part of the dialogue data collected under the auspices of ATR/NICT in Japan [7]. The
data contains three free-flowing conversations among four participants and each
conversation is about 1,5 hours long. One of the participants is Japanese, while the
other three come from three different countries in Europe but are familiar with
Japanese culture due to living or having lived in the country. The dialogues are
conducted in English, and topics vary from casual chatting and story telling to travel
information and cultural conventions.
