How to translate text using browser tools
1 September 2017 Speaking through the body
Markus Koppensteiner, Greg Siegle
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

When people speak, they gesture. However, is the audience watching a speaker who is sensitive to this link?We translated the body movements of politicians into stick-figure animations and separated the visual from the audio channel. We then asked participants to match a selection of five audio tracks (including the correct one) with the stick-figure animations. The participants made correct decisions in 65% of all cases (chance level of 20%). Matching voices with animations was less difficult when politicians showed expansive movements and spoke with a loud voice. Thus, people are sensitive to the link between motion cues and vocal cues, and this link appears to become even more apparent when a speaker shows expressive behaviors. Future work will have to refine and validate the methods applied and investigate how mismatches between communication channels affect the impressions that people form of politicians.

Markus Koppensteiner and Greg Siegle "Speaking through the body," Politics and the Life Sciences 36(2), 104-113, (1 September 2017). https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2017.23
Published: 1 September 2017
JOURNAL ARTICLE
10 PAGES

This article is only available to subscribers.
It is not available for individual sale.
+ SAVE TO MY LIBRARY

KEYWORDS
bodily expressiveness
gesture
impression formation
multimodal signals
Nonverbal communication
politics
stick figure animation
RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS
Get copyright permission
Back to Top