Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies of naturalistic face-to-face communication havedemonstrated temporal coordination patterns such as thesynchronization of verbal and non-verbal behavior, which providesevidence for the proposal that verbal and non-verbalcommunicative control derives from one system. In this study, weargue that the observed relationship between verbal and non-verbalbehaviors depends on the level of analysis. In a re-analysis of acorpus of naturalistic multimodal communication (Louwerse et al.,2012), we focus on measuring the temporal patterns of specificcommunicative behaviors in terms of their burstiness. Weexamined burstiness estimates across different roles of the speakerand different communicative channels. We observed moreburstiness for verbal versus non-verbal channels, and for moreversus less informative language sub-channels. These findingsdemonstrate a new method for analyzing temporal patterns incommunicative behaviors, and they suggest a more complexrelationship between verbal and non-verbal channels thansuggested by prior studies.