This paper reports a study of the forms and functions of head movements produced in the dimension of depth in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Specifically, the paper describes and analyzes the phonetic forms and prosodic, grammatical, communicative, and textual functions of nods, head thrusts, nodding, and head pulls occurring in FinSL data consisting of a continuous dialogue recorded with motion capture technology. The analysis yields a novel classification of the kinematic characteristics and functional properties of the four types of head movement. However, it also reveals that there is no perfect correspondence between form and function in the head movements investigated.

This article discusses a certain type of nonmanual action, signers' head movements, from a semiotic perspective. It presents a typology of head movements and their iconic, indexical and symbolic features based on Peircean and post-Peircean semiotics. The paper argues for the view that (i) indexical strategies are very prominent in head movements, (ii) iconic features are most evident in enacting, while non-enacting description is less common, (iii) symbolic types for tokens are infrequent, although some movements-such as nodding and shaking the head-may become more conventional or schematized, and (iv) different types of head movements involve different proportions of iconicity, indexicality and symbolicity as well as different degrees of control in their production and interpretation. The treatment of head movements is extended to a discussion of semiotic versatility in the signification of actions of a signer's body, as well as to the treatment of nonmanuals in the theoretical description of sign languages. Finally, the paper presents a perspective on nonmanuals in which different nonmanual cues are examples of how signification, and human cognition in general, are closely connected to the embodied experience of existing and navigating in the physical and social world around us.

Both eye tracking and motion capture technologies are nowadays frequently used in human sciences, although both technologies are usually used separately. However, measuring both eye and body movements simultaneously would offer great potential for investigating cross- modal interaction in human (e.g. music and language-related) behavior. Here we combined an Ergoneers Dikablis head mounted eye tracker with a Qualisys Oqus optical motion cap- ture system. In order to synchronize the recordings of both devices, we developed a gener- alizable solution that does not rely on any (cost-intensive) ready-made / company-provided synchronization solution. At the beginning of each recording, the participant nods quickly while fixing on a target while keeping the eyes open – a motion yielding a sharp vertical displacement in both mocap and eye data. This displacement can be reliably detected with a peak-picking algorithm and used for accurately aligning the mocap and eye data. This method produces accurate synchronization results in the case of clean data and therefore provides an attractive alternative to costly plug-ins, as well as a solution in case ready-made synchronization solutions are unavailable.

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