An earlier study showed that listeners in conversations insert brief responses ("mm-hmm," "I see," and the like) almost exclusively at the ends of rhythmical units in the talker's speech (Dittmann & Llewellyn, 1967). In this study these vocal responses were compared with a visible one, the head nod, and it was found that the 2 occurred together more often than chance would predict. Content analysis showed that these co-occurrences usually serve an interpersonal function: the wish of the listener to speak or the wish of the talker for feedback. When they did occur together, nods were found to precede the vocal response slightly. Apparently the listener must hold a vocal response politely until the speaker has finished a unit, but may nod before then.
The relationship between body movement and speech rhythm was newly formulated following Boomer's work on hesitations in speech: movements were predicted to occur early in phonemic clauses and at points following nonfluencies within clauses. A preliminary study of old data for which the movements were located by watching motion pictures bore out the prediction, and led to a more intensive study using more representative speech samples, and recording techniques designed to eliminate possible artifacts. The results were highly significant, but the amount of movement variance accounted for was small. The data collected by this method allowed direct test of statements by Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy, and by Scheflen, whose claims of very close speech-movement relationships were found to be exaggerated. The linkage found between hesitations and movements was interpreted in terms of speech encoding processes.1 This paper is an extension of one given at a symposium chaired by Paul Ekman, titled "New Approaches to the Study of Facial Expression and Body Movement," at the American Psychological Association meetings in New York, 1966.2 Requests for reprints should be sent to Allen T.
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