Listener Responses as a Collaborative Process: The Role of Gaze

Abstract

The authors examined precisely when and how listeners insert their responses into a speaker's narrative. A collaborative theory would predict a relationship between the speaker's acts and the listener's responses, and the authors proposed that speaker gaze coordinated this collaboration. The listener typically looks more at the speaker than the reverse, but at key points while speaking the speaker seeks a response by looking at the listener, creating a brief period of mutual gaze called here a gaze window. The listener was very likely to respond with “mhm,” a nod, or other reaction during this period, after which the speaker quickly looked away and continued speaking. This model was tested with 9 dyads in which 1 person was telling a close-call story to the other. The results confirmed the model for each dyad, demonstrating both collaboration in dialogue at the microlevel and a high degree of integration and coordination of audible and visible acts, in this case, speech and gaze.