Conference Presentation: Pragmatic influences on the form of head nods: Insights from a study of spoken and signed interactions

Abstract

This study examines the phonetic properties of addressees’ head nods in natural dyadic signed and spoken interactions. Expanding our previous research, we analyze German Sign Language (DGS), spoken German, Russian Sign Language (RSL), and spoken Russian. We explore whether head nods with distinct pragmatic functions exhibit systematic phonetic variations, offering the first cross-linguistic and cross-modal analysis of head nod form in interaction.