In two experiments, we explored the time course and flexibility with which speakers' eye gaze can be used to disambiguate referring expressions in spontaneous dialog. Naive director/matcher pairs were separated by a barrier and saw each other's faces but not their displays. Displays held identical objects, with the matcher's arranged in a row and…

This paper describes two experiments on the role of audiovisual prosody for signalling and detecting meta-cognitive information in question answering. The first study consists of an experiment, in which participants are asked factual questions in a conversational setting, while they are being filmed. Statistical analyses bring to light that the…

Speakers employ acoustic cues (pitch accents) to indicate that a word is important, but may also use visual cues (beat gestures, head nods, eyebrow movements) for this purpose. Even though these acoustic and visual cues are related, the exact nature of this relationship is far from well understood. We investigate whether producing a visual beat…