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Hömke, P., Levinson, S. C., Emmendorfer, A. K., & Holler, J. (2025). Eyebrow movements as signals of communicative problems in human face-to-face interaction. Royal Society Open Science, 12(3): 241632. doi:10.1098/rsos.241632.
Abstract
Repair is a core building block of human communication, allowing us to address problems of understanding in conversation. Past research has uncovered the basic mechanisms by which interactants signal and solve such problems. However, the focus has been on verbal interaction, neglecting the fact that human communication is inherently multimodal. Here, we focus on a visual signal particularly prevalent in signalling problems of understanding: eyebrow furrows and raises. We present, first, a corpus study showing that differences in eyebrow actions (furrows versus raises) were systematically associated with differences in the format of verbal repair initiations. Second, we present a follow-up study using an avatar that allowed us to test the causal consequences of addressee eyebrow movements, zooming into the effect of eyebrow furrows as signals of trouble in understanding in particular. The results revealed that addressees’ eyebrow furrows have a striking effect on speakers’ speech, leading speakers to produce answers to questions several seconds longer than when not perceiving addressee eyebrow furrows while speaking. Together, the findings demonstrate that eyebrow movements play a communicative role in initiating repair during conversation rather than being merely epiphenomenal and that their occurrence can critically influence linguistic behaviour. Thus, eyebrow movements should be considered core coordination devices in human conversational interaction.Additional information
link to preprint -
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1998). Politeness, introduction to the reissue: A review of recent work. In A. Kasher (
Ed. ), Pragmatics: Vol. 6 Grammar, psychology and sociology (pp. 488-554). London: Routledge.Abstract
This article is a reprint of chapter 1, the introduction to Brown and Levinson, 1987, Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Cambridge University Press). -
Levinson, S. C. (1998). Deixis. In J. L. Mey (
Ed. ), Concise encyclopedia of pragmatics (pp. 200-204). Amsterdam: Elsevier. -
Levinson, S. C. (1998). Minimization and conversational inference. In A. Kasher (
Ed. ), Pragmatics: Vol. 4 Presupposition, implicature and indirect speech acts (pp. 545-612). London: Routledge. -
Levinson, S. C. (1998). Studying spatial conceptualization across cultures: Anthropology and cognitive science. Ethos, 26(1), 7-24. doi:10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.7.
Abstract
Philosophers, psychologists, and linguists have argued that spatial conception is pivotal to cognition in general, providing a general, egocentric, and universal framework for cognition as well as metaphors for conceptualizing many other domains. But in an aboriginal community in Northern Queensland, a system of cardinal directions informs not only language, but also memory for arbitrary spatial arrays and directions. This work suggests that fundamental cognitive parameters, like the system of coding spatial locations, can vary cross-culturally, in line with the language spoken by a community. This opens up the prospect of a fruitful dialogue between anthropology and the cognitive sciences on the complex interaction between cultural and universal factors in the constitution of mind. -
Pederson, E., Danziger, E., Wilkins, D. G., Levinson, S. C., Kita, S., & Senft, G. (1998). Semantic typology and spatial conceptualization. Language, 74(3), 557-589. doi:10.2307/417793.
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Levinson, S. C. (1995). 'Logical' Connectives in Natural Language: A First Questionnaire. In D. Wilkins (
Ed. ), Extensions of space and beyond: manual for field elicitation for the 1995 field season (pp. 61-69). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.3513476.Abstract
It has been hypothesised that human reasoning has a non-linguistic foundation, but is nevertheless influenced by the formal means available in a language. For example, Western logic is transparently related to European sentential connectives (e.g., and, if … then, or, not), some of which cannot be unambiguously expressed in other languages. The questionnaire explores reasoning tools and practices through investigating translation equivalents of English sentential connectives and collecting examples of “reasoned arguments”. -
Levinson, S. C. (1995). Interactional biases in human thinking. In E. N. Goody (
Ed. ), Social intelligence and interaction (pp. 221-260). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Levinson, S. C. (1995). Three levels of meaning. In F. Palmer (
Ed. ), Grammar and meaning: Essays in honour of Sir John Lyons (pp. 90-115). Cambridge University Press. -
Wilkins, D., Pederson, E., & Levinson, S. C. (1995). Background questions for the "enter"/"exit" research. In D. Wilkins (
Ed. ), Extensions of space and beyond: manual for field elicitation for the 1995 field season (pp. 14-16). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.3003935.Abstract
How do languages encode different kinds of movement, and what features do people pay attention to when describing motion events? This document outlines topics concerning the investigation of “enter” and “exit” events. It helps contextualise research tasks that examine this domain (see 'Motion Elicitation' and 'Enter/Exit animation') and gives some pointers about what other questions can be explored.
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