Visual Prosody Across Cultures

Communication partners not only exchange information through the auditory channel but also use a wide range of visual cues, such as facial expressions, eye gaze, hand gestures, and other types of body language. The latter set of features can be subsumed under the term ‘visual prosody’. Visual cues have been shown to be communicatively relevant, as they not only help to improve speech intelligibility, especially in noisy conditions, but can also signal information that is not expressed through the words or the syntactic structure of an utterance. This chapter examines how visual prosody can be put to use to highlight specific communicative functions, and how such cues relate to auditory forms of prosody. It also presents results of comparative analyses of visual prosody to shed light on resemblances and differences in how it is being exploited in different cultures.