Speech and Gaze during Parent-Child Interactions: The Role of Conflict and Cooperation

ABSTRACTFace-to-face interaction is a primary mode of human social behavior which includes verbal and non-verbal expressions, e.g. speech, gazing, eye contact, facial displays, and gestures (Holler & Levinson, 2019). In this study, we investigated the relation between speech and gaze behavior during 'face-to-face' dialogues between parents and their preadolescent children (9-11 years). 79 child-parent dyads engaged in two semi-structured conversations about family-related topics. We used a state-of-the-art dual-eye tracking setup (Hessels et al. 2019) that is capable of concurrently recording eye movements, frontal video recordings, and audio from two conversational partners. Crucially, the setup is designed in such a way that eye contact can be maintained using half-silvered mirrors, as opposed to e.g. Skype where the camera is located above the screen. Parents and children conversed about two different topics for five minutes each, one 'conflict' (e.g. bedtime, homework) and one 'cooperation' (e.g. organize a party) topic. Preliminary analyses of speech behavior (Figure 1) show that children talked more in the cooperative task and talked less when discussing a topic of disagreement with their parents. Conversely, parents talked more during the conflict-task and less during the cooperative-task. The next step is to combine measures of speech and gaze to investigate the interplay and temporal characteristics of verbal and non-verbal behavior during face-to-face interactions.