A dual eye tracking study of the influence of color and gaze cues on the use of referring expressions in a situated Farsi dialogue environment

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Enformatik Enstitüsü, Bilişsel Bilimler Anabilim Dalı, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2015

Öğrenci: SARA RAZZAGHI ASL

Danışman: MURAT PERİT ÇAKIR

Özet:

The aim of this study is to explore the structure of Farsi referring expressions (RE) used during a collaborative Tangram puzzle solving activity, and investigate the role of different visual cue conditions on the types of RE and the degree of gaze coordination. A jigsaw task design was used which required participants to work as a team to solve Tangram puzzles in three conditions where (a) all pieces had the same color (normal condition), (b) all pieces were assigned a distinct color (color condition), and (c) all pieces had the same color but the partner’s gaze information was visualized on the screen (gaze cueing condition). In this respect, two main aspects were under scrutiny: linguistic and dual eye-tacking analysis, while both are assumed to be enriched recourses for modulating joint attention. For this purpose, a corpus of Farsi REs in a situated dialogue environment is constructed to evaluate the frequency of specific RE’s features and their length distribution. Descriptive statistics show that Mosallas (Triangle), Un (That) are the most frequently used RE words in the Farsi corpus. The RE feature distributions are compared with Turkish, Japanese and English RE corpora compiled with the same task to provide a cross-linguistic analysis. Conversational analysis of features of REs revealed the prominent role of color terms in identifying objects and the striking influence of shape and size in gaze cueing condition. Besides, cross-linguistic analysis results demonstrate that Farsi is distant to all languages in this respect. In case of dual eye-tracking analysis, results were not influenced significantly under different status and also along six trials. However, there was a significant interaction effect between conditions and trials especially for the color case.