de Vos Connie, van der Kooij Els, Crasborn Onno
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Lang Speech. 2009;52(Pt 2-3):315-39. doi: 10.1177/0023830909103177.
The eyebrows are used as conversational signals in face-to-face spoken interaction (Ekman, 1979). In Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), the eyebrows are typically furrowed in content questions, and raised in polar questions (Coerts, 1992). On the other hand, these eyebrow positions are also associated with anger and surprise, respectively, in general human communication (Ekman, 1993). This overlap in the functional load of the eyebrow positions results in a potential conflict for NGT signers when combining these functions simultaneously. In order to investigate the effect of the simultaneous realization of both functions on the eyebrow position we elicited instances of both question types with neutral affect and with various affective states. The data were coded using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS: Ekman, Friesen, & Hager, 2002) for type of brow movement as well as for intensity. FACS allows for the coding of muscle groups, which are termed Action Units (AUs) and which produce facial appearance changes. The results show that linguistic and affective functions of eyebrows may influence each other in NGT. That is, in surprised polar questions and angry content question a phonetic enhancement takes place of raising and furrowing, respectively. In the items with contrasting eyebrow movements, the grammatical and affective AUs are either blended (occur simultaneously) or they are realized sequentially. Interestingly, the absence of eyebrow raising (marked by AU 1+2) in angry polar questions, and the presence of eyebrow furrowing (realized by AU 4) in surprised content questions suggests that in general AU 4 may be phonetically stronger than AU 1 and AU 2, independent of its linguistic or affective function.
在面对面的口语交流中，眉毛被用作对话信号（埃克曼，1979）。在荷兰手语（NGT）中，内容疑问句中眉毛通常会皱起，而极性疑问句中眉毛会扬起（科茨，1992）。另一方面，在一般的人际交流中，这些眉毛位置分别还与愤怒和惊讶相关（埃克曼，1993）。眉毛位置功能负荷的这种重叠，使得NGT手语使用者在同时结合这些功能时可能会产生冲突。为了研究同时实现这两种功能对眉毛位置的影响，我们引出了带有中性情感以及各种情感状态的两种疑问句实例。使用面部动作编码系统（FACS：埃克曼、弗里森和哈格，2002）对数据进行编码，记录眉毛动作的类型以及强度。FACS允许对肌肉群进行编码，这些肌肉群被称为动作单元（AUs），它们会产生面部外观变化。结果表明，在NGT中，眉毛的语言和情感功能可能会相互影响。也就是说，在惊讶的极性疑问句和愤怒的内容疑问句中，分别会出现扬起和皱起的语音增强。在眉毛动作相反的项目中，语法和情感动作单元要么混合（同时出现），要么依次实现。有趣的是，愤怒的极性疑问句中没有眉毛扬起（由动作单元1 + 2标记），而惊讶的内容疑问句中有眉毛皱起（由动作单元4实现），这表明一般来说，动作单元4在语音上可能比动作单元1和动作单元2更强，无论其语言或情感功能如何。
