Prosodic and gestural expression of interactional agreement

Abstract

Conversational interactions are cooperatively constructed activities in which participants negotiate their entrances, turns and alignments with other speakers, oftentimes with an underlying long-term objective of obtaining some agreement. Obtaining a final and morally binding accord in a conversational interaction is of importance in a great variety of contexts, particularly in psychotherapeutic interactions, in contractual negotiations or in educational contexts. Various prosodic and gestural elements in a conversational interaction can be interpreted as signals of a speaker's agreement and they are probably of importance in the emergence of an accord in a conversational exchange. In this paper, we survey the social and psychological context of agreement seeking, as well as the existing literature on the visual and prosodic measurement of agreement in conversational settings. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.