In the world of conversation, individuals engage in a delicate dance of words and movements as they strive to communicate with one another. This study explores the fascinating interplay between how people coordinate linguistically and kinetically during interactions in Danish and Norwegian. Just like a synchronized dance performance, participants in conversations align their language and body movements to achieve common goals. The researchers investigate whether this alignment occurs across different levels of language (such as word choice and sentence structure) and modes of communication (speech and gestures). Through data analysis, they discover that there are both convergent and divergent patterns of behavior when it comes to linguistic and kinetic entrainment. Kinetic entrainment, or the coordination of body movements, was found to be positively associated with low-level linguistic entrainment (lexical alignment), while negatively associated with high-level linguistic entrainment (semantic alignment). These findings support the notion of a dynamic coordination between individuals in conversation, where similarity and complementarity coexist. By exploring the underlying research, you can gain a deeper understanding of how language and body movements intertwine to create meaningful communication.

Abstract
In conversation, individuals work together to achieve communicative goals, complementing and aligning language and body with each other. An important emerging question is whether interlocutors entrain with one another equally across linguistic levels (e.g., lexical, syntactic, and semantic) and modalities (i.e., speech and gesture), or whether there are complementary patterns of behaviors, with some levels or modalities diverging and others converging in coordinated fashions. This study assesses how kinematic and linguistic entrainment interact with one another across levels of measurement, and according to communicative context. We analyzed data from two matched corpora of dyadic interaction between—respectively—Danish and Norwegian native speakers engaged in affiliative conversations and task-oriented conversations. We assessed linguistic entrainment at the lexical, syntactic, and semantic level, and kinetic alignment of the head and hands using video-based motion tracking and dynamic time warping. We tested whether—across the two languages—linguistic alignment correlates with kinetic alignment, and whether these kinetic-linguistic associations are modulated either by the type of conversation or by the language spoken. We found that kinetic entrainment was positively associated with low-level linguistic (i.e., lexical) entrainment, while negatively associated with high-level linguistic (i.e., semantic) entrainment, in a cross-linguistically robust way. Our findings suggest that conversation makes use of a dynamic coordination of similarity and complementarity both between individuals as well as between different communicative modalities, and provides evidence for a multimodal, interpersonal synergy account of interaction.

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