Effects of linguistic proficiency and conversation topic on listener’s gaze in triadic conversation

Abstract

Gaze is reported to have important functions in communication, such as expressing emotional states, exercising social control, highlighting the informational structure of speech, and coordinating floor-apportionment. For these reasons, studying these communicative functions is expected to contribute to HCI systems by identifying communication characteristics and the role of each participant. This study analyzes how the communicative functions of utterances affect the listener’s gazing activities from the viewpoint of grounding, based on a triadic corpus with newly labeled grounding tags. The results showed that the duration of a listener’s gaze is longer in second language (L2) conversations, in goal-oriented conversations, and during utterances presenting new information. These results suggest that linguistic proficiency, conversation topic, and grounding factors all affect a listener’s gazing activities, providing us with some information that could assist in the design of HCI, HRI, and CSCW systems that better reflect the interaction contexts and linguistic proficiency of users.