You do speak with your mouth full.
Text: Yvonne Vahlensieck
Communication isn’t just about what we say. When tasting foods in the company of others, we communicate in different ways.
Our mouths play a key role in social interaction, a role that goes far beyond speech. The world became particularly aware of this during the Covid-19 pandemic: If a person’s lips are hidden behind a mask, we understand the words they’re saying but may find it difficult to interpret them correctly. Was that strange comment supposed to be funny, or were they being serious? Is my doctor about to give me good news or bad news? Is my teacher in a good or bad mood today? Without additional visual cues such as a smile or pinched lips, it isn’t always easy to gauge a situation.
This is why Lorenza Mondada, a linguist at the University of Basel, studies not just the words that leave our mouths, but everything that comes with them. “You can’t view language in isolation,” she says. “It goes hand in hand with facial expressions, gestures and other body movements.” And so her research takes place not in a lab, but in a wide range of social contexts under realistic conditions. “It’s like observing animals in the wild, rather than in a zoo.”
Together with her team of researchers, she films people in everyday situations — at the workplace, at the market, at home — and analyzes the videos in minute detail. They consider not only who says what, but also body movements, laughter, glances and much more. All these aspects play their part in intersubjectivity — reciprocity in communication between the participants in a conversation.
Through these studies, Mondada has already discovered quite a bit about how people manage to understand one another in various social situations, languages and cultures. For example, when watching the videos, we can precisely predict which person is about to speak next. The mouth gives it away. “Before we even begin to speak, our lips open and we take a breath. This signals to those around us that we are ready to say something.”
As the analysis goes on to show, conversation partners register this embodied projection and are able to respond quickly — for example, by encouraging the person to speak or deliberately preventing them from doing so. “Whether consciously or unconsciously, people recognize these subtle cues and often exploit them strategically,” says Mondada.
Focus on the mouth.
Among other activities, Mondada pays particular attention to interactions between people while eating and drinking. “These are meaningful social and cultural activities that have been ignored by linguists for a long time, even though they can be very interesting for the study of language.”
In these situations in particular, the mouth plays many parts: Slurping, sipping, chewing, swallowing, tasting, giving a verdict, identifying an ingredient — it has to fulfil all of these tasks, although not necessarily at the same time. Eating and talking are usually mutually exclusive, so eating and drinking occur shortly before or after speaking. This requires careful time management. It also enables the other people at the table to anticipate who is about to speak and when. “A full mouth can’t actually speak, and yet it says so much”, says Mondada.
For example, Mondada has explored how the roles assumed by the mouth during food intake vary among social contexts. There are significant differences between a family evening meal, a dinner in a gourmet restaurant and a food-tasting event. While a conventional lunch will revolve around the conversational topics rather than the food being eaten, a gourmet meal will place far more emphasis on appreciating and discussing the flavors.
When a person samples culinary specialties, the mouth becomes the entire focus, together with other senses. Mondada has demonstrated this in, among others, a study conducted in gourmet shops in 15 European countries and 12 different languages. Each time, she filmed recurrent interactions in which a server offers a customer a small piece of cheese to try.
Her analysis shows that when we sample food in this way, we systematically follow the same pattern: There is total silence as the person tastes the food. They exaggerate their chewing motion, explore the inside of their cheeks with their tongue, lick their lips. All their attention is focused on the sensory experience taking place in their oral cavity.
Beyond words.
Movements in the rest of the body only resume once the last crumb has been swallowed. And then the mouth is free to speak again, assessing and describing the taste. “During a normal meal, the processes taking place in the mouth usually remain discreet, while in tasting moments the movements of the mouth are a public event that contributes to the social activity,” says Mondada.
Findings such as these confirm that linguistic research misses out on a lot if it focuses solely on the analysis of words and conversations. Successful interpersonal communication is contingent on many additional factors, including the right timing, the interpretation of subtle physical cues and the incorporation of all the senses. With its many functions and forms of expression, the mouth is an excellent example of this.
More articles in this issue of UNI NOVA (May 2025).