Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We report an experiment on the interpretation of pointing gestures in speech reports. German speakers read a narrative in which a speaker reported another person's utterance using either direct or indirect discourse. The reporting speaker produced a pointing gesture whose interpretation depended on whether it was taken to be part of the reported speech event or a contribution of the current utterance. As only direct discourse is typically assumed to be quotational, we hypothesized that participants would interpret the gesture as part of the reported speech event more frequently in direct discourse. Participants identified the referent of the gesture and rated their certainty. The results confirmed the hypothesis: Participants were more likely to interpret the pointing gesture as part of the reported speech event in direct discourse. At the same time, gesture transformations were rare and associated with lower certainty across conditions, indicating competition from the canonical referential function of pointing.