Eyebrow Raising, Discourse Structure, and Utterance Function in Face-to-face Dialogue

Some studies have suggested a relationship between eyebrow raising and different aspects of the verbal message, but our knowledge about this link is still very limited. If we could es-tablish and characterise a relation between eyebrow raises and the linguistic signal we could better understand human multi-modal communication behaviour. This study investigated eye-brow raising in a corpus of task-oriented English dialogues in relation to discourse structure and utterance function. Based on previous observations of body movement, eyebrow raises were predicted to occur more frequently in utterances starting a new segment in the structure of the dialogue. It was also pre-dicted that they would be more frequent in instructions and in queries than in other types of utterance. Analyses using gener-alised linear models showed that eyebrow raises occurred more frequently in the initial utterance of high-level discourse seg-ments than in other parts of the dialogue, and more frequently also in instructions than in other types of utterance. The start of a lower level in the discourse structure was not associated with eyebrow raising, nor were utterances with a questioning function. These findings provide tentative evidence of a re-lation between eyebrow raising and aspects of the linguistic message which is important not only from a psycholinguistic point of view but also for practical applications in the design of multimodal dialogue systems