A SPEAKER AND LISTENER GAZE COORDINATION IN MONOLOGICAL BIMODAL COMMUNICATION

This paper, written in the framework of bimodal communication, describes the oculomotor behavior of the speaker and listener during monologue communication. In the Bavelas and colleagues’ paper (2002), the following pattern of oculomotor behavior was proposed. In the process of monologue discourse, the speaker looks at the listener relatively rarely, and the listener, on the contrary, responds with frequent gazes. When their eyes meet, there is a mutual gaze, and a gaze window opens. After some — usually a short — time, the listener gives the speaker a backchannel marker, shortly after which the speaker closes the gaze window and looks away. This pattern was identifi ed by Bavelas and colleagues as a result of analyzing video recordings, so it needed to be verifi ed using a more accurate method of eyetracking. In this paper, as a result of performing a qualitative complex microanalysis of a monologue fragment of the corpus “Russian Pear Chats and Stories” recordings, we confi rmed the pattern proposed by Bavelas, which once again demonstrates the importance of studying bimodal communication with the help of the eyetracking methodology.