Watching Television

Abstract

This paper describes the gaze behaviour of television viewers talking to each other. It is based on the ATTAC-corpus which consists of transcribed video recordings of Britons watching football at home on TV. In regular everyday conversation, generally people tend to face each other, and gaze is used as a key cue for turn-taking and interactionalitv. However, in this specific setting, the conversationalists face the following dilemma: they can direct their gaze at each other, but only at the cost of not being able to look at the screen. The data suggest that spatial arrangements, age, and an orientation towards humour influence the gaze behaviour of the viewers. In contrast to conversation in general, the rule "the listener should look at the speaker, when the speaker chooses to look at the listener" could not be corroborated.