lnu.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Prominence, prosody and the functions of head and eyebrow movement in newsreading and spontaneous dialogue
KTH Royal instute of technology, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4628-3769
Linnaeus University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of Swedish Language. Lund University, Sweden. (LNUC Intermedial and multimodal studies, IMS)ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5324-3071
2018 (English)In: ISGS - 8th International Conference - Book of Abstracts, 2018, p. 94-94Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Sustainable development
Not refering to any SDG
Abstract [en]

Prominent words and syllables are frequently conveyed in speech communication by a complex of multimodal signals involving both speech (such as focal pitch accents) and gesture (such as head nods and eyebrow movement). This study presents data concerning the frequency and temporal organization of head and eyebrow gestures and accented syllables obtained from two different data sources: te levision newsreading and spontaneous dialogue. The television corpus comprises 31 brief newsreadings from Swedish Television representing four news anchors (two female, two male) containing 986 words (6.5 minutes). It was annotated for focal accents and h ead and eyebrow beats, independently by three annotators. A total of 233 head movements and 67 eyebrow movements were annotated. 165 head movements (71%) occurred with a focally accented stressed syllable. Two additional independent annotators marked the t emporal location of the eyebrow movement related to the head movement. The locations of 51 eyebrow movements were agreed upon (Cohen’s Unweighted Kappa 0.75) with 57% preceding, 41% simultaneous with, and 2% following the head movement. For the femalespontaneous speech analysis, five male and two male-- minute random excerpts of four dialogues (two male pairs) were taken from the Spontal corpus of Swedish dialogue, a database of unrestricted conversation comprised of highquality audio and video r ecordings and motion capture. The motion capture data enabled automatic detection of head movements resulting in a total of 1545 detected nods. Two annotators manually checked the automatic detection and classified the nods as simple or complex resulting i n a total of simple nods. Syllable boundaries were annotated +/1054 one syllable from each simple nod and each syllable was categorized as unaccented, accented or focally accented. Of the 1054 nods, 422 stressed syllables occurred in conjunction with a n od (40%) of which 95 were unaccented, 130 were accented, and 197 had focal accent (Cohen’s Unweighted Kappa 0.60). Only 19% of the simple head nods occurred in conjunction with a focal accent compared to 71% in the newsreading data. Eyebrow movement was an notated for each simple nod resulting in a total of 100 eyebrow movements. The locations of 78 eyebrow movements were agreed upon (Cohen’s Unweighted Kappa 0.54) with 10% preceding, 76% simultaneous with, and 14% following the head movement. These results indicate considerable differences between the two genres. In newsreading, we find a general temporal ordering of multimodal signals for prominence where eyebrow movement precedes head nods with both being anchored to but followed by a focally accented syl lable. In the spontaneous dialogues, while we do find a number of similar instances of multimodal prominence expression, much head and eyebrow movement is not primarily related to prominence but rather has other expressive and communicative functions with gestures frequently assuming the predominant role of prominence signaling.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2018. p. 94-94
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics
Research subject
Humanities, Linguistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-119591OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-119591DiVA, id: diva2:1740129
Conference
The 8th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies, Cape Town, South Africa, July 4-8, 2018.
Funder
Swedish Research Council, VR 2017-02140Available from: 2023-02-28 Created: 2023-02-28 Last updated: 2023-03-01Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Other links

Book of abstracts

Authority records

Ambrazaitis, Gilbert

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
House, DavidAmbrazaitis, Gilbert
By organisation
Department of Swedish Language
General Language Studies and Linguistics

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 46 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf