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ABSTRACT
In this article, we examine gaze direction in responses to polar questions using both quantitative and conversation analytic (CA) methods. The data come from a novel corpus of conversations in which participants wore eye-tracking glasses to obtain direct measures of their eye movements. The results show that while most preferred responses are produced with gaze toward the questioner, most dispreferred responses are produced with gaze aversion. We further demonstrate that gaze aversion by respondents can occasion self-repair by questioners in the transition space between turns, indicating that the relationship between gaze direction and preference is more than a mere statistical association. We conclude that gaze direction in responses to polar questions functions as a signal of response preference. Data are in American, British, and Canadian English.
Funding
This research was made possible by the financial support of the Language and Cognition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and European Research Counsel’s Advanced Grant 269484 INTERACT to Stephen C. Levinson.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental files referred to in this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.
Notes
1 The S designation refers to items in the Supplementary Materials.
2 Extended transcripts for all data extracts are available in the Supplementary Materials.
3 For the purpose of this Figure, visual responses without verbal components (e.g., affirmative nods) were analyzed as single TCUs though the status of such actions as TCUs is equivocal. For a similar graph with responses split at the median response duration into long and short responses, see Figure S5.