Mutual Gaze and Linguistic Repetition in a Multimodal Corpus

Abstract

This paper investigates the correlation between mutual gaze and linguistic repetition, a form of alignment, which we take as evidence of mutual understanding. We focus on a multimodal corpus made of three-party conversations and explore the question of whether mutual gaze events correspond to moments of repetition or non-repetition. Our results, although mainly significant on word unigrams and bigrams, suggest positive correlations between the presence of mutual gaze and the repetitions of tokens, lemmas, or parts-of-speech, but negative correlations when it comes to paired levels of representation (tokens or lemmas associated with their part-of-speech). No compelling correlation is found with duration of mutual gaze. Results are strongest when ignoring punctuation as representations of pauses, intonation, etc. in counting aligned tokens.