ISCA Archive AVSP 2019
ISCA Archive AVSP 2019

Do visual cues to interrogativity vary between language modalities? Evidence from spoken Portuguese and Portuguese Sign Language

Marisa Cruz, Marc Swerts, Sónia Frota

In spoken European Portuguese (EP), eyebrow raising has been considered to be a question marker, as it is the dominant visual cue for questions across regional variants. In Portuguese Sign Language (LGP), it is known that questions are conveyed by a specific facial (and bodily) expression, and that nonverbal correlates for intonation are conveyed by the face, head and upper body, but no detailed information on the prosodic role of non-manuals is available. The present study explores the role of non-manuals in conveying interrogativity in LGP, focusing on eyebrow and head movements, time-aligned with manuals. Native signers were videotaped while performing an adapted version of the Discourse Completion Task for LGP. Results show that eyebrow lowering is the dominant nonmanual conveying interrogativity, but head can also play this role together with eyebrows. Besides the interrogative whword manually articulated, wh-questions differ from yes-no questions in the head movement type: up in the former and down in the latter. In contrast with other signed languages, eyebrow movement does not vary across question types in LGP. Finally, interrogativity in LGP is conveyed by the same facial element (eyebrow) as in spoken EP, the opposite eyebrow movement used suggests its grammaticalization in each language modality.