Floor Apportionment and Mutual Gazes in Native and Second-Language Conversation

Quantitative analysis of gazes between a speaker and listeners was conducted from the viewpoint of mutual activities in floor apportionment, with the assumption that mutual gaze plays an important role in coordinating speech interaction. We conducted correlation analyses of the speaker's and listener's gazes in a three-party conversation, comparing native language (L1) and second language (L2) interaction in two types (free-flowing and goal-orient- ed). The analyses showed significant correlations between gazes from the current to the next speaker and those from the next to the current speaker during utterances preceding a speaker change in L1 conversation, suggesting that the participants were coordinating their speech turns with mutual gazes. In L2 conversation, however, such a correlation was found only in the goal-oriented type, suggesting that linguistic proficiency may affect the floor-apportionment function of mutual gazes, possibly because of the cognitive load of understanding/producing utterances.