A previous study among European-Americans (McClave, 2000) observed that particular forms of head movements occur in specific communicative environments. The present study investigates whether any of the form–function relationships observed in the original study are cross-cultural. The database consists of seven hours of videotaped spontaneous conversations in Arabic, Bulgarian, Korean, and African-American Vernacular English.
This study suggests that head movements are used for semantic, discourse, and interactive functions in these four languages from three genetically unrelated language families.1 Identical head movements occur in three environments across all four cultures: lateral movements co-occur with expressions of inclusivity, the head changes position for each item on a list, and the head orients toward a specific location selected by the speaker when referring to non-present or abstract entities. Head movements function as speaker backchannel requests in each culture as well, but the particular form of movement corresponds to the culture’s head motion for affirmation.
2023. When Attentional and Politeness Demands Clash: The Case of Mutual Gaze Avoidance and Chin Pointing in Quiahije Chatino. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 47:2 ► pp. 211 ff.
Kang, Dahyun, Sonya S. Kwak, Hanbyeol Lee, Eun Ho Kim & JongSuk Choi
2020. 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), ► pp. 11383 ff.
Mhaidli, Abraham, Manikandan Kandadai Venkatesh, Yixin Zou & Florian Schaub
2020. Listen Only When Spoken To: Interpersonal Communication Cues as Smart Speaker Privacy Controls. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2020:2 ► pp. 251 ff.
Moretti, Stefania & Alberto Greco
2020. Nodding and shaking of the head as simulated approach and avoidance responses. Acta Psychologica 203 ► pp. 102988 ff.
2019. Negotiating Activity Closings with Reciprocal Head Nods in Mandarin Conversation. In Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings, ► pp. 369 ff.
Cooperrider, Kensy, James Slotta & Rafael Núñez
2018. The Preference for Pointing With the Hand Is Not Universal. Cognitive Science 42:4 ► pp. 1375 ff.
2017. A framework for the multimodal joint work of turn construction in face-to-face interaction. Cognitive Systems Research 41 ► pp. 99 ff.
Harrison, Simon & Pierre Larrivée
2016. Morphosyntactic Correlates of Gestures: A Gesture Associated with Negation in French and Its Organisation with Speech. In Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives [Language, Cognition, and Mind, 1], ► pp. 75 ff.
Brentari, Diane, Alessio Di Renzo, Jonathan Keane & Virginia Volterra
2015. Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Sources of a Handshape Distinction Expressing Agentivity. Topics in Cognitive Science 7:1 ► pp. 95 ff.
BRENTARI, DIANE, MARIE A. NADOLSKE & GEORGE WOLFORD
2012. Can experience with co-speech gesture influence the prosody of a sign language? Sign language prosodic cues in bimodal bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15:2 ► pp. 402 ff.
McNeill, David, Liesbet Quaeghebeur & Susan Duncan
2010. IW - “The Man Who Lost His Body”. In Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ► pp. 519 ff.
Kita, Sotaro
2009. Cross-cultural variation of speech-accompanying gesture: A review. Language and Cognitive Processes 24:2 ► pp. 145 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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