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Part of
Intersubjectivity in Action: Studies in language and social interaction
Edited by Jan Lindström, Ritva Laury, Anssi Peräkylä and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 326] 2021
► pp. 329–

Movement synchrony as a topic of empirical social interaction research

| Tampere University
| Aalto University

In this chapter, we consider movement synchrony from two different perspectives. On the one hand, we report a small-scale empirical study to test the hypothesis that movement synchrony is a sequential phenomenon, which serves as a demonstration of how conversation analytically informed research on participants’ unconscious tendencies to synchronize their body movements could proceed in practice. On the other hand, we consider movement synchrony through three closely related, yet essentially different, conceptual lenses: conditional relevance, dialogic resonance, and affordance. We suggest that a specific combination of the insights provided by these three conceptual tools would make conversation analytically informed study of movement synchrony both possible and fruitful.

Keywords: movement synchrony, joint decision-making, conditional relevance, dialogic resonance, affordance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Movement synchrony as a (sequential) contextual phenomenon
  • 3.An empirical case: Synchronization of body movement during joint decision-making
    • 3.1Data and method
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Measurements
      • 3.1.3Procedure
      • 3.1.4Data processing
    • 3.2Results
    • 3.3Discussion of the results
  • 4.How should one account for the interactional functions of movement synchrony?
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.326.15ste
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