Deictic gestures in coaching interactions

In motor skill coaching interaction coaches use several techniques to improve the motor skill of the coachee. Through goal setting, explanations, instructions and feedback the coachee is motivated and guided to improve the motor skill. These verbal speech actions are often accompanied by iconic or deictic gestures and other nonverbal acts, such as demonstrations. We are building a virtual coach that is capable of the same behaviour. In this paper we have taken a closer look at the form, type and timing of deictic gestures in our corpus of human-human coaching interactions. We show that a significant amount of the deictic gestures actually touch the referred object, that most of the gestures are complimentary (contrary to previous research) and often occur before the lexical affiliate.