Unaddressed participants’ gaze behavior in Flemish Sign Language interactions: Planning gaze shifts after recognizing an upcoming (possible) turn completion

Abstract

One basic characteristic of human interaction lies in its tight temporal coordination, i.e. interlocutors manage to achieve smooth turn-transitions and as such minimize the occurrences of gaps and overlaps. To accomplish this rapid exchange of turns-at-talk, interlocutors must not only recognize but also anticipate the end of the current speaker's turn. This study aims to contribute to the theory of the turn-taking machinery by providing an analysis of unaddressed participants' gaze behavior during question-response sequences in Flemish Sign Language interactions. We replicated Holler and Kendrick's (2015) work on spoken English conversations with the aim of investigating a potential modality effect in online turn processing. Results show that unaddressed participants in Flemish Sign Language interactions tend to track the current speaker more reliably than unaddressed participants in spoken English conversations. An analysis of the timing of gaze shifts, however, shows striking similarities with Holler and Kendrick (2015). It thus seems that unaddressed participants in both spoken English and Flemish Sign Language interactions orient to turn completion by planning their gaze shifts as a reaction to turn-final cues. As both the end of the turn and the first possible completion were defined by the stroke of the last sign, our findings support the notion of stroke-to-stroke boundaries in signed interactions.