Title
Facial expressions and speech acts: experimental evidences on the role of the upper face as an illocutionary force indicating device in language comprehension.
Abstract
Language scientists have broadly addressed the problem of explaining how language users recognize the kind of speech act performed by a speaker uttering a sentence in a particular context. They have done so by investigating the role played by the illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs), i.e., all linguistic elements that indicate the illocutionary force of an utterance. The present work takes a first step in the direction of an experimental investigation of non-verbal IFIDs because it investigates the role played by facial expressions and, in particular, of upper-face action units (AUs) in the comprehension of three basic types of illocutionary force: assertions, questions, and orders. The results from a pilot experiment on production and two comprehension experiments showed that (1) certain upper-face AUs seem to constitute non-verbal signals that contribute to the understanding of the illocutionary force of questions and orders; (2) assertions are not expected to be marked by any upper-face AU; (3) some upper-face AUs can be associated, with different degrees of compatibility, with both questions and orders.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s10339-017-0809-6
Cognitive Processing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Experimental pragmatics,Facial expressions,Illocutionary force indicating devices,Psycholinguistics,Speech acts
Experimental Pragmatics,Psychology,Utterance,Cognitive psychology,Facial expression,Psycholinguistics,Speech act,Linguistics,Sentence,Comprehension
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
18
3
1612-4782
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
2
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Filippo Domaneschi101.01
Marcello Passarelli200.34
Carlo Chiorri3133.62