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.