Influence of culture in multimodal interfaces: Gesture behavior between Anglo-Celtic and Latin Americans

In multimodal interfaces, hand gestures often help convey meaning to the spoken word; therefore, the cultural background of the gesturing person might be an influential factor in the interaction with these interfaces. This paper presents an empirical study aimed at singling out basic cultural differences in hand gesture performance between two cultures: Anglo-Celtics and Latin Americans. The focus in this paper is given to the video analysis of the two cultures describing two objects with their hands. The purpose is to use gesture segmentation to define predominant hand gestures by culture. Conclusions are drawn from the experiment and are linked to cultural attributes proposed by theorists like Hall and Hofstede. The findings state that cultural differences exist in the description of the object, which might have implications for the development of gesture-based multimodal interfaces. As Anglo-Celtics are low context cultures, they used more words and gestures in longer time. On the other hand, Latin Americans, which represent the high context culture, had more frequent gestures, but performed fewer ones, in shorter time. We also found that as the complexity of a task increases, so does the use and type of gestures. The performance of a multimodal interface will not only be affected by the task being performed, but by the cultural background and language skills of the user.