Co-Speech Movement in Conversational Turn-Taking

Abstract

This study investigates co-speech movements as a function of the conversational turn exchange type, the type of speech material at a turn exchange, and the interlocutor's role as speaker or listener. A novel interactive protocol that mixes conversation and (non-read) nursery rhymes works to elicit many speech turns and co-speech movements within dyadic speech interaction. To evaluate a large amount of data, we use the density of co-speech movement as a quantitative measure. Results indicate that both turn exchange type and participant role are associated with variation in movement density for head and brow co-speech movement. Brow and head movement becomes denser as speakers approach overlapping speech exchanges, indicating that speakers increase their movement density as an interruptive exchange is approached. Similarly, head movement generally increases after such overlapping exchanges. Lastly, listeners display a higher rate of co-speech movement than speakers, both at speech turns and remote from them. Brow and head movements generally behave similarly across speech material types, conversational roles, and turn exchange types. On the whole, the study demonstrates that the quantitative co-speech movement density measure advanced here is useful in the study of co-speech movement and turn-taking.