Title
When Words Fail: Collaborative Gestures During Clarification Dialogues.
Abstract
Research on co-speech gestures has primarily focussed on speakers. However, in conversation non-speaking addressees can also gesture. Often this is to provide concurrent feedback such as backchannels but sometimes it involves gestures that relate to the specific content of the speaker’s turn. We hypothesise that nonspeakers should contribute most actively during clarification sequences i.e. at the moments when mutualunderstanding is threatened. We test this hypothesis using a corpus of story-telling dialogues, captured using video and motion capture. The results show that during clarification sequences speaker and non-speaker behaviours tend to merge. Non-speakers in particular move their hands faster and produce more than twice as many content-specific specific gestures in overlap with speaker turns. These results underline the collaborative nature of conversation, the strategic importance of nonverbal resources for sustaining mutual-understanding and the critical role of clarification and repair in successful communication.
Year
Venue
Field
2015
AAAI Spring Symposia
Motion capture,Underline,Conversation,Gesture,Computer science,Nonverbal communication,Human–computer interaction,Artificial intelligence,Merge (version control),Machine learning
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Patrick G. Healey111721.13
Nicola Plant271.52
Christine Howes3177.64
Mary Lavelle451.60