Hesitation in Intercultural Communication: Some Observations and Analyses on Interpreting Shoulder Shrugging

Abstract

Abstract. This paper concerns the different ways in which hesitation, and hesitation related phenomena like uncertainty, doubt and other phenomena where lack of knowledge is involved are expressed in different cultures. The paper focuses especially on shoulder shrugging as a signal of hesitation or uncertainty, and starts from the observation that shoulder shrugging has different interpretations depending on the interlocutor's cultural background. It is not commonly used in Eastern cultures while in Western cultures it is a sign of uncertainty and ignorance. The paper reports a small study on the differences in interpretation of a particular video tape gesture, and draws some preliminary conclusions of how this affects intercultural communication between human interlocutors and between humans and conversational agents.

Multimodal signals of high commitment in expert-to-expert contexts

“…Another body marker of speaker's high certainty is the shoulder shrug, that is, shoulders raising and then going back down to initial position. The shrug is a polysemous signal which may assume, in different contexts, quite diverse meanings, such as: subjective or intersubjective epistemic marker of high commitment; epistemic marker of speaker's ignorance (lack of knowledge), or marker of speaker's non implication (either as a consequence of speaker powerlessness or carelessness) (Debras, 2015;Debras and Cienki, 2012;Jokinen and Allwood, 2010). Shoulder shrugs do not occur with a specific lexical affiliate, hence we did not count the occurrences of shoulder shrugs in one condition versus another.…”

Code switching in Grade 11 students of UM Peñaplata College

“…It is also evident that the participants used 'ah' to choose and evaluate within themselves the next word that they would utter to continue their speech. Jokinen and Allwood, (2010) stated in their research that the uttering of "ah" during a conversation by the people in most eastern countries such as Japan and Philippines indicates that the speaker is hesitating and is uncertain on what to say or what to express.…”

Machine Body Language: Expressing a Smart Speaker’s Activity with Intelligible Physical Motion

“…This is to indicate uncertainty about QUBI's interpretation of the user's request. Note that not all cultures adhere to shrugging the shoulders as a sign of uncertainty [40], especially in Eastern cultures the shrug is not necessarily interpreted as a sign of uncertainty, as it is in Western cultures. We envision this motion to be used when none of QUBIs interpretations of what was said are above a set confidence threshold (O2), as opposed to when QUBI has two highly likely interpretations (for which we use M7wiggle).…”