Listener responses as a collaborative process: The role of gaze

The authors examined precisely when and how listeners insert their responses into a speaker’s narrative. A collaborative theory would predict a relationship between the speaker’s acts and the listener’s responses, and the authors proposed that speaker gaze coordinated this collaboration. The listener typically looks more at the speaker than the reverse, but at key points while speaking the speaker seeks a response by looking at the listener, creating a brief period of mutual gaze called here a gaze window. The listener was very likely to respond with “mhm, ” a nod, or other reac-tion during this period, after which the speaker quickly looked away and contin-ued speaking. This model was tested with 9 dyads in which 1 person was telling a close-call story to the other. The results confirmed the model for each dyad, demon-strating both collaboration in dialogue at the microlevel and a high degree of inte-gration and coordination of audible and visible acts, in this case, speech and gaze. While listening to someone tell a story, listeners regularly make brief appropriate responses (sometimes called “back channels, ” after Yngve, 1970). The goal of the research reported here was to understand the timing of these responses, that is, why listeners respond when they do. Is this a haphazard event, is it determined by characteristics of the listener, or is it related to actions of the speaker (and if so, how)? We have pursued these questions first through an inductive qualitative analysis, then by statistical tests of the hypotheses we had developed. The data were videotapes of unacquainted dyads in which one person told a close-call story to the other