ABSTRACT
Clark has suggested that language serves to coordinate “joint actions” allowing two or more people to achieve a mutual goal. Verbal interactions among conversers are known to produce a natural, rhythmic patterning, having related-content, similar stress patterns, and compatible rhythms. Shockley, Santana, and Fowler used an objective measure, known as cross recurrence quantification, to quantify the degree to which cooperative conversation influences interpersonal coordination. They found that participant-pairs had greater shared postural activity when cooperatively conversing with one another than when conversing with others. This chapter investigates the nature of the coordination observed by Shockley et al. with three experiments testing what aspects of speaking may mediate interpersonal postural coordination in the context of conversation.
