Summary:
Gaze combines many functions in communication. Previous studies have observed that gaze helps coordinate turn-taking (Duncan, 1972) (Kendon,1967), establish a given piece of information as part of common ground (Clark and Brennan, 1991) (Clark, 1996), and express intimacy (Mehrabian and Ferris, 1967), and the condition of conversational setup might change the relative importance of these functions (Kleinke, 1986).
In this talk, I will present the results of a sequence of studies analyzing gazes during utterances and silence in a face-to-face three party conversation setting in a native language (L1) and in a second language (L2). The results reveal different gaze patterns that reflect the differences in difficulty felt by the participants in each conversational condition.