Body movement and emphasis in speech

Videotapes were made of opposite-sex pairs of students in conversation with one another who had been asked to discuss items from an attitude questionnaire on which they had disagreed. At the end of the conversation, the subjects were asked to replay the videotape and to indicate which body movements of themselves and their partners they considered conveyed emphasis; these movements were then categorized using a detailed body movement system. In a second procedure, the occurrence of vocal stress was scored, together with the associated body movements. The results showed that whereas a wide diversity of primarily hand/arm movements were selected by the subjects as communicating emphasis, it was movements of all parts of the body which were related to vocal stress. It was concluded that a close relationship does exist between body movement and tonic stress, and that this can only be effectively appreciated through a body movement scoring system which enables a detailed description to be given of the visual and temporal relationship between body movement and phonemic clause structure.