Coordination of head movements and speech in first encounter dialogues

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the temporal alignment between head movements and associated speech segments in the NOMCO corpus of first encounter dialogues. Our results show that head movements tend to start slightly before the onset of the corresponding speech sequence and to end slightly after, but also that there are delays in both directions in the range of -/+ 1s. Various factors that may influence delay duration are investigated. Correlations are found between delay length and the duration of the speech sequences associated with the head movements. Effects due to the different head movement types are also discussed.