Harriet Yates & Corien Bary – Using affective response to measure conversational commitments: Evidence from two fEMG studies

Co-authors: Bob van Tiel & Peter de Swart.

This presentation explores the assignment of commitments in conversation. While theoretical work has explored the range of commitment-bearing acts, key questions remain unresolved, such as the role of addressees, the gradability of commitment, and the effect of evidentials. To empirically address these questions, we propose facial electromyography (fEMG) as a novel method in this field, to detect implicit affective reactions to commitment violations. We present our proof-of-method study which demonstrates that commitment violations elicit strong ‘frowning’ corrugator muscle activation (associated with negative affective response). We then report on a second study, in which  this method is used to measure the effect of reportative evidentiality on perceived speaker commitment. Specifically, we found that marking hearsay evidence for one’s claim significantly lowers commitment, but found no evidence that this effect varies by syntactic form (here, embedding vs. parenthetical constructions). We outline an ongoing study on commitments de lingua (a commitment to word choice rather than truth-value), and future directions for applying this method. The findings highlight fEMG’s potential to uncover subtle norms in conversation, with implications for pragmatics, semantics, and multimodal communication.

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