Micro-Analysis of Referring Expressions in a Dual Eye Tracking Paradigm

Recent studies on referring expressions usually resort to quantitative methods such as recurrence analysis to measure the degree of coordination among eye gaze patterns of interlocutors. Such methods are successful in providing an overall picture of the degree of coupling among partners and how the degree of coupling varies in response to contextual factors such as the degree of shared beliefs and backgrounds. However, such a global perspective makes it difficult to observe how sequential organization of conversation influences the degree of coupling. Through a case study of an excerpt obtained from a dual eye tracking experiment, this paper illustrates how the concepts and methods appropriated from conversation analysis can be employed to study the relationship among dual eye gaze patterns and sequentially organized conversation.