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Spoken dialogue systems are predominantly evaluated using offline methods such as user ratings or task-oriented measures. Various phenomena in conversational speech, however, are known to affect the way the listener's comprehension unfolds over time, and not necessarily the final result of the comprehension process. For instance, in human reference comprehension, conversational signals like hesitations have been shown to ease processing of expressions referring to difficult-to-describe targets, as can primarily be observed in listeners' anticipatory eye movements rather than in their final reference resolution decision. In this study, we explore eye tracking for testing conversational dialogue systems, looking at how listeners process automatically generated referring expressions containing defective attributes. We investigate whether hesitations facilitate the processing of partially defective system utterances and track the user's eye movements when listening to expressions with: (i) semantically defective but fluently synthesized adjectives, (ii) defective and lengthened adjectives, i.e. containing a conversational uncertainty signal. Our results are encouraging: whereas the offline measure of task success does not show any differences between the two conditions, the listeners' eye movements suggest that processing of partially defective utterances might be facilitated by conversational hesitations.

In this paper, data from a current study on bilingual language acquisition and language promotion of children is presented. 96 narratives from 32 Turkish-German and Russian-German bilingual children were examined with regard to the acquisition of narrative ability in three rounds of tests. The macrostructure of each narrative was evaluated based on the theories of Westby (2005), Stein and Glenn (1977) and Gagarina et al. (2012). In the quantitative analysis, the factor age of onset (AoO) was considered and therefore, two hypotheses were introduced: 1) There is an influence of AoO on the narrative ability of L2 German bilingual children. And 2) The narrative ability will converge over time and after three years there will be no difference between the groups. Neither of those hypotheses could be confirmed by the examined narrative data. Hence, other influences on narrative ability were discussed in the last chapter and prospects for further research were given. In sum, the article shows that more narrative data of these children should be collected to make a comprehensive conclusion about the influence of AoO on narrative ability.

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