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Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment. The Processing Issues pp 393–405Cite as

Communicative Functions of Eye Closing Behaviours

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6800))

Abstract

This work presents a typology of eye closing behaviours based on a semantic taxonomy of communicative signals. The types of eye closing we investigate are blinks, eye-closures and winks performed during political debates. While other studies in the literature attempt to classify blinks and eyeclosures according to their duration or (in)completeness of the closure, our study aims to distinguish between communicative and non communicative types of eye closing, and among the former category, between different meanings possibly conveyed by closing one’s eyes. We argue that while winks are always communicative, i.e. they bear a meaning, blinks and eye-closures may have a communicative value too. To analyse eye closing types both an observational and a Speaker’s judgement approach are adopted, and the items of eye closings exemplified are classified on the basis of a semantic taxonomy that distinguish signals as to their conveying information on the World, on the Senders mind or on the Sender’s Identity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Education Sciences Department, University Roma Tre, 53 Manin, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Laura Vincze & Isabella Poggi

Authors
  1. Laura Vincze
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  2. Isabella Poggi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Psychology and IIASS, International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies, Second University of Naples, Vietri sul Mare, SA, Italy

    Anna Esposito

  2. School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Alessandro Vinciarelli

  3. Department of Telecommunication and Media Informatics, Laboratory of Speech Acoustics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 1117, Budapest, Hungary

    Klára Vicsi

  4. TELECOM ParisTech, CNRS-LTCI UMR 5141, 75014, Paris, France

    Catherine Pelachaud

  5. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Anton Nijholt

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Vincze, L., Poggi, I. (2011). Communicative Functions of Eye Closing Behaviours. In: Esposito, A., Vinciarelli, A., Vicsi, K., Pelachaud, C., Nijholt, A. (eds) Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment. The Processing Issues. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6800. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25775-9_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25775-9_36

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25774-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25775-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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