Multimodal Communicative Feedback in Swedish

Abstract

This study investigates multimodal communicative feedback among speakers of Swedish. We find that the most common way of providing feedback in Swedish is by a multimodal combination of a gestural verbal and a vocal-verbal basic feedback unit, or by just a feedback word or a verbal head gesture on its own. The most common verbal head gestures are nods, and the most common vocal-verbal feedback is just one of four short words. We also find that while nods are primarily used for giving feedback, all other head gestures are more typically used for non-feedback purposes.