Gaze and Gesture Activity in Communication

Non-verbal communication is important in order to maintain fluency of communication. Gestures, facial expressions and eye-gazing function as nonverbal means to convey feedback and provide subtle cues to control and organise conversations. In this paper, verbal and non-verbal feedback are discussed from the point of view of how they contribute to the communicative activity in conversations, especially the type of strategies that the speakers deploy when they aim to construct shared understanding of the tasks and duties in interaction in general. The study concerns conversational data, collected for the purposes of designing and developing more natural interactive systems.