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The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation
During natural conversation, people must quickly understand the meaning of what the other speaker is saying. This concerns not just the semantic content of an utterance, but also the social action (i.e., what the utterance is doing—requesting information, offering, evaluating, checking mutual unders...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8393665/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34439615 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11080996 |
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author | Trujillo, James P. Holler, Judith |
author_facet | Trujillo, James P. Holler, Judith |
author_sort | Trujillo, James P. |
collection | PubMed |
description | During natural conversation, people must quickly understand the meaning of what the other speaker is saying. This concerns not just the semantic content of an utterance, but also the social action (i.e., what the utterance is doing—requesting information, offering, evaluating, checking mutual understanding, etc.) that the utterance is performing. The multimodal nature of human language raises the question of whether visual signals may contribute to the rapid processing of such social actions. However, while previous research has shown that how we move reveals the intentions underlying instrumental actions, we do not know whether the intentions underlying fine-grained social actions in conversation are also revealed in our bodily movements. Using a corpus of dyadic conversations combined with manual annotation and motion tracking, we analyzed the kinematics of the torso, head, and hands during the asking of questions. Manual annotation categorized these questions into six more fine-grained social action types (i.e., request for information, other-initiated repair, understanding check, stance or sentiment, self-directed, active participation). We demonstrate, for the first time, that the kinematics of the torso, head and hands differ between some of these different social action categories based on a 900 ms time window that captures movements starting slightly prior to or within 600 ms after utterance onset. These results provide novel insights into the extent to which our intentions shape the way that we move, and provide new avenues for understanding how this phenomenon may facilitate the fast communication of meaning in conversational interaction, social action, and conversation. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8393665 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-83936652021-08-28 The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation Trujillo, James P. Holler, Judith Brain Sci Article During natural conversation, people must quickly understand the meaning of what the other speaker is saying. This concerns not just the semantic content of an utterance, but also the social action (i.e., what the utterance is doing—requesting information, offering, evaluating, checking mutual understanding, etc.) that the utterance is performing. The multimodal nature of human language raises the question of whether visual signals may contribute to the rapid processing of such social actions. However, while previous research has shown that how we move reveals the intentions underlying instrumental actions, we do not know whether the intentions underlying fine-grained social actions in conversation are also revealed in our bodily movements. Using a corpus of dyadic conversations combined with manual annotation and motion tracking, we analyzed the kinematics of the torso, head, and hands during the asking of questions. Manual annotation categorized these questions into six more fine-grained social action types (i.e., request for information, other-initiated repair, understanding check, stance or sentiment, self-directed, active participation). We demonstrate, for the first time, that the kinematics of the torso, head and hands differ between some of these different social action categories based on a 900 ms time window that captures movements starting slightly prior to or within 600 ms after utterance onset. These results provide novel insights into the extent to which our intentions shape the way that we move, and provide new avenues for understanding how this phenomenon may facilitate the fast communication of meaning in conversational interaction, social action, and conversation. MDPI 2021-07-28 /pmc/articles/PMC8393665/ /pubmed/34439615 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11080996 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Trujillo, James P. Holler, Judith The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation |
title | The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation |
title_full | The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation |
title_fullStr | The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation |
title_full_unstemmed | The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation |
title_short | The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation |
title_sort | kinematics of social action: visual signals provide cues for what interlocutors do in conversation |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8393665/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34439615 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11080996 |
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