Eye-movement Research and the Investigation of Dialogue Structure

In this talk we report about eye-movement research and the investigation of dialogue structure as it has been going on at several institutions at the University of Bielefeld (cf. the reports listed in the bibliography). Dialogues, one might argue, can be regarded as sequences of turns in which certain microand macro-structures can be distinguished. How can this be related to the investigation of agents’ eye movements? Working with empirical data, transcripts, and video tapes of two-person, task-oriented dialogue reveals that agents do not behave as one would expect from the standpoint of abstract semantics and pragmatics. Most researchers do know about that, of course, at least since the Russell-Donellan-Kripke discussion about speakers’ meaning and abstract meaning. Nevertheless, it is not trivial to find out what speakers do and to start to develop theories thereof. There has been little research in this area since the 1970s. As we will see, investigation of speakers’ meaning is difficult because one has to develop precise methods for the observation of their doings. Although dialogues and video tapes provide only a rough idea of what is going on, let us start from there. The following observations should be uncontroversial with respect to these and similar data: