Speaker gaze and disfluencies during storytelling toward a robot or a human: The role of partner type and temperamental shyness

Nils Frederik Tolksdorf, Adriana Hanulíková


Abstract
Storytelling in face-to-face dialogue involves coordinating multiple modalities, including speech and gaze. When the addressee is a social robot rather than a human, narrators’ speech and gaze behavior may differ. However, few studies have examined both modalities within the same narratives, and it remains unclear how different aspects of multimodal behavior vary depending on whether the interaction partner is a social robot or a human. In this study, we examined how adults narrated picture-based stories to a social robot and a human interlocutor. Two modalities of narrative production were considered: pausing, separated into filled and unfilled pauses, and gaze behavior during the narration, directed either toward the story pictures or toward the listener. Critically, we examined whether shyness, considered as a continuous dimension of individual variation, relates to pausing and gaze behavior. Results revealed that speakers produced fewer filled pauses when narrating to the robot than to the human, while unfilled pauses did not differ. Additionally, higher shyness was associated with longer, though not more frequent, filled pauses in human-directed narration, although shyness did not reliably predict the magnitude of the partner effect. We discuss how our findings may contribute to a more nuanced understanding of multimodal interactions with embodied agents.
Anthology ID:
2026.mint-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Esam Ghaleb, Ece Takmaz, Diego Frassinelli, Bulat Khaertdinov, Raquel Fernández, Zerrin Yumak, Asli Ozyurek
Venues:
MINT | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
117–126
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mint-1.13/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Nils Frederik Tolksdorf and Adriana Hanulíková. 2026. Speaker gaze and disfluencies during storytelling toward a robot or a human: The role of partner type and temperamental shyness. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue, pages 117–126, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Speaker gaze and disfluencies during storytelling toward a robot or a human: The role of partner type and temperamental shyness (Tolksdorf & Hanulíková, MINT 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mint-1.13.pdf