About the relationship between eyebrow movements and Fo variations

Abstract

Speech production is always accompanied by facial and gestural activity. The present study is part of a broader research project on how head movements and facial expressions are related to voice variations in different speech situations. Ten normal subjects were recorded while reading aloud, answering yes/no questions, and dialoguing with an interviewer. Rapid rising-falling eyebrow movements produced by the subjects as they spoke were associated with Fo rises in only 71% of the cases. This suggests that eyebrow movements and fundamental frequency changes are not automatically linked (i.e., they are not the result of muscular synergy), but are more a consequence of linguistic and communicational choices. Note also that 38% of the eyebrow movements were produced while the subject was not speaking. Thus, eyebrow movements may also serve as back-channel signals or play a role in turn-taking during conversation.

The role of intonation and visual cues in the perception of sentence types: Evidence from European Portuguese varieties

“…Within the most analyzed visual cues (eyebrows, head movements, and pointing gestures), and alongside pitch accents in the auditory component, eyebrow movements were shown to play a strong role in the perception and distinction of specific sentence types and pragmatic meanings in several languages. Eyebrow movements may function as a question marker in French (Purson et al, 1999), even when they are not necessarily coordinated with fundamental frequency changes (Cavé et al, 1996). The same visual cue also has a significant effect on the perception of focus (Krahmer et al, 2002) and prominence , 2006, 2008Krahmer & Swerts, 2007) in Dutch, and may help to distinguish between specific sentence types and pragmatic meanings across languages, such as between Dutch and Catalan (Borràs-Comes & Prieto, 2011;Borràs-Comes et al, 2014;Crespo-Sendra et al, 2013).…”

Seeing a singer helps comprehension of the song’s lyrics

“…Vowels are often lengthened in singing (Scotto di Carlo, 2007). Head and eyebrow movements are correlated with changes in pitch in speaking and in singing (Cavé et al, 1996;Munhall et al, 2004;Thompson & Russo, 2007;Yehia, Kuratate, & Vatikiotis-Bateson, 2002). For singing, these facial correlates of pitch may become more important, since they may help in normalizing vowels for melody-induced pitch changes that are larger than those for speech.…”

Read my lips: speech distortions in musical lyrics can be overcome (slightly) by facial information

“…Visually, changes in F0 are mostly invisible in articulatory gestures, but correlate strongly with eyebrow and head movements (Cavé et al, 1996;Munhall et al, 2004;Yehia et al, 2002). Viewing the head movements of a speaker, for example, can improve the recognition of words in a sentence (Munhall et al, 2004) compared to seeing a speaker with no head movements.…”