1 Facial Gestures and Communication: what induces raising eyebrow movements in Map Task dialogues

There is some evidence suggesting that eyebrow movements may have linguistic functions in communication, but research in this area has been scarce. This study tested the hypothesis that eyebrow raises have communicative functions and therefore will tend to be distributed unequally across conversational move types. The data consisted of six dialogues of participants performing a cooperative task, namely the Map Task. There was an overall significant difference in the distribution of eyebrow raises across move types. A preliminary analysis on one of the dialogues sugg ested that their distribution did not depend simply on differences in the length of the various move types. Further research is in progress that may eventually provide useful information for more efficient engineering of multimodal communication systems.