An Indian Corpus of Gestures for Nouns and Verbs: A Preliminary Study

Nikitha M.; S P Goswami

doi:10.37591/rrjon.v11i1.2462

Abstract

The study aimed to develop a corpus of comprehensive gestures for a set of nouns and verbs in the Indian context. The study was conducted in the following three phases. Phase 1: Gestural nouns and verbs were selected from the existing word lists. Phase 2: A set of 221 nouns and 122 verbs were enacted and recorded by a professional actor and a cameraman respectively. Phase 3: Two groups of participants i.e., 15 young (18-39 years) and 15 old (40-69 years) neuro-typical adults participated in the two tasks namely (a) naming and (b) rating tasks. The analyses of the responses revealed maximum uniformity of correct responses between the participants at 85% agreement level for both noun and verb gestures. Thus, a set of 86 noun and 60 verb gesture videos entered the final gesture corpus which satisfied the criteria. Further, the varied responses among the participants in interpreting the gestures and type of gestures have been discussed and documented. The corpus developed can serve as stimulus in various gesture studies. Although the corpus comes with few limitations, the data provided would help the researchers to carefully select the gesture videos based on their purpose of the study.

Abstract

Keywords