A substantial amount of research on facial movements has focused on areas such as the relationship between facial expression and emotion or between articulatory movements and speech. However, the relation between non-articulatory facial gestures and speech has received little attention.

There is some evidence to suggest that brow movements are used as conversational signals during speech and research on American Sign Language has shown how signers fulfil prosodic functions via gestures of the upper part of the face. I am doing an observational study of eyebrow movements in dialogues recorded with the experimental design of the Map Task.

The dialogues have been coded both in terms of dialogue structure and of eyebrow movements. Analysis is in progress to establish possible relations between eyebrow movements and discourse structure. Further analysis will investigate the alignment of the gestures with suprasegmental aspects of speech.

The final goal of this research is to gain a better understanding of audiovisual speech processing that may contribute to the design of better multimodal communication systems.