Comparison of Effect of Speaker’s Eye Gaze on Selection of Next Speaker between Native- and Second-Language Conversations

In face-to-face communication, eye gaze is known to play various roles such as managing the attention of interlocutors, expressing intimacy, exercising social control, highlighting particular speech content and coordinating floor apportionment. In second language (L2) communication, one’s perception of eye gaze is expected to have more importance than in native language (L1) because eye gaze can be used to partially compensate for the deficiencies of verbal expressions. This paper examines the efficiency of eye gaze for floor apportionment through quantitative analyses of eye gaze during three-party conversations in L1 and L2. The authors analyze the average ratios at which the participant to whom the speaker gazes takes the floor according to the duration of pauses between two consecutive utterances. The analysis results show that this ratio decreases as the duration of a pause becomes longer in L1 conversations, whereas the gazed-at participant often takes the floor even after a longer duration of pause in L2 conversations. This suggests that the effect of the speaker’s eye gaze decreased when the duration of pause was prolonged in L1 conversations, whereas this effect was maintained in L2 conversations.