Difference in Eye Gaze for Floor Apportionment in 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. For second language (L2) communication, one's perception of eye gaze is expected to have more importance than for native language (L1) because eye gaze is assumed to partially compensate for the deficiencies of verbal expressions. This paper examines and clarifies the efficiency of the function of eye gaze in the coordination of floor apportionment through quantitative analyses of eye gaze during three-party conversations in L1 and L2. Specifically, the authors conducted ANOVA tests on the eye-gaze statistics of a speaker and two listeners during utterances while focusing on whether floor-switch occurs subsequent to the utterance. The analysis results show that the listener who is gazed at more by the speaker is more likely to be the next speaker with a higher probability in L2 than in L1 conversations. Meanwhile, the listeners gaze more at the speaker in L2 than in L1 conversation for both the utterances just before a floor switch and cases with no floor switch. These results support the observation that the eye gaze of the speaker is efficient for floor apportionment in L2 conversations and suggest that longer listeners' eye gazes in L2 conversations also function efficiently in smooth floor apportionment.