Paralinguistic Behaviors in Dialog as a Continuous Process

Prior research on gaze, turn-taking, and backchannels suggests that the speaker’s gaze cues the listener’s paralinguistic responses, including feedback behaviors. To explore how conversants use feedback cues and responses, I studied a corpus of face-to-face conversational interaction, primarily using a conversation-analytic approach. Analysis of the dialogs suggests that paralinguistic behaviors express meaning at a level of granularity often smaller than dialog control acts. Behaviors such as gaze and nodding can be seen as continuous rather than discrete actions. Moreover, speaker gaze shift toward the listener is a polysemous expression that can cue a range of behaviors in the listener, including continued attention, head nods as backchannels, utterances as backchannels, and turn-taking. The analysis also suggests that gaze, from both speakers and listeners, can express a state rather than a discrete act.