Movement synchrony as a topic of empirical social interaction research

In this chapter, we consider movement synchrony from two different perspectives. On the one hand, we report a small-scale empirical study to test the hypothesis that movement synchrony is a sequential phenomenon, which serves as a demonstration of how conversation analytically informed research on participants’ unconscious tendencies to synchronize their body movements could proceed in practice. On the other hand, we consider movement synchrony through three closely related, yet essentially different, conceptual lenses: conditional relevance, dialogic resonance, and affordance. We suggest that a specific combination of the insights provided by these three conceptual tools would make conversation analytically informed study of movement synchrony both possible and fruitful.