Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although many studies have analyzed the communicative functions of gaze, it is still unclear how linguistic proficiency and communication contexts affect gazing activities. Quantitative analyses of speaker’s and listener’s gaze were conducted taking the factors of grounding in communication, conversation topic, and linguistic proficiency into consideration. The results showed that the duration of a listener’s gaze is much longer during utterances that convey new information while the duration of a speaker’s gaze did not show much difference, suggesting that the characteristics of the grounding act factor affect a listener’s gazing activities but not those of the speaker. We also observed that linguistic proficiency and conversation topic have a much greater effect on the listener’s gaze. The results will contribute to multi-party interaction studies that examine the effect of linguistic proficiency, and provide valuable information that could assist in the design of interaction support systems for users with different linguistic proficiency.