Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study on the use of gesture deixis during explanations, a sample of 24 videorecorded dyadic interactions of a board game explanation was analyzed. The relation between the use of gesture deixis by different explainers and their interpretation of explainees' understanding was investigated. In addition, we describe explainers' intra-individual variations related to their interactions with three different explainees consecutively. While we did not find a relation between interpretations of explainees' complete understanding and a decrease in explainers' use of gesture deixis, we demonstrated that the overall use of gesture deixis is related to the process of interactional monitoring and the attendance of a different explainee.