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Analysis of the factors involved in person-directed pointing gestures in dialogue speech

Pointing gestures directed to a person are usually taken as an impolite manner. However, such person-directed pointing gestures commonly appear in casual dialogue interactions, and convey important visual prosodic information. In this study, we extracted pointing gestures appearing in a three-party spontaneous dialogue database, and analyzed several factors including gesture type (hand shape, orientation, motion direction), dialogue acts, inter-personal relationship and attitudes. Analysis results indicate that more than half of the observed pointing gestures use the index finger towards the interlocutor, but are not particularly perceived as impolite. Pointing with the index finger moving in the forward direction was found to be predominant towards interlocutors with close relationship, while pointing with the open palm was found to be more frequent towards first-met person or older person. The majority of the pointing gestures were found to be used along with utterances whose contents are related or directed to the pointed person, while part were accompanied with attitudinal expressions such as yielding the turn, attention drawing, sympathizing, and joking/bantering.