The effect of eyebrow movements on question identification
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2022-07-19
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en
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Abstract
In conversation, many speakers use social actions. It is important for the listener to quickly
recognize the social action of the speaker in order to understand what the speaker is trying to
convey. Questions frequently occur in conversations, and require immediate action from the
listener. Several studies have demonstrated that eyebrow frowns and raises facilitate question
identification. However, few studies have investigated the effect of eyebrow movements as
they naturally occur in communication on accuracy and response times. Therefore, the current
study investigated the effect of eyebrow movements, which are based on natural intensities,
on question identification. To investigate this, we did an online experiment. In this
experiment, participants did a forced choice two-alternative behavioural task, where
participants had to judge whether the utterance pronounced was a question or a statement. The
utterances were pronounced by an avatar, whose behaviour was based on the natural
behaviour shown in a multimodal Dutch face-to-face corpus. The participants’ task was to
identify whether the utterance of the avatar was a question or a response as quickly and
accurately as possible. The aim of this experiment was to determine whether specific visual
signals, such as eyebrow frowns or raises, play a role in the perception of questions. Gorilla,
an online testing platform, was used to collect data. Results showed similar accuracy scores
for the presence (frowns, raises) and absence of eyebrow movement. Additionally,
participants were significantly faster in identifying questions when an utterance was paired
with a frown in comparison to a raise or the absence of eyebrow movement. Thus, the
presence of frowns results in a quicker identification of questions.
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