William S Condon b. 1934, unconfirmed
W. S. Condon began his research in human communication in
1964 using a frame-by-frame video recording (1/25th of a second) to analyse
people talking (and listening) in conversation, an area that maintained his
interest for decades of future research. Through his pioneering research Condon
noticed ‘self-synchrony’, that the speaker’s interlocking systems worked
rhythmically; and that there were movements that seemed to co-occur between
those of the listener and the speaker, called ‘interactional synchrony’. In his
quest to help define gesture, Condon’s video observations could extend beyond
those noticed by the naked eye, including micro movements. He recorded segments
of body movement, and this microanalysis allowed for the two apparently
disparate systems to be studied in terms of how they integrate (co-occur)
during speech and organizations of change in movement (correlated with
articulatory changes), as well as movement during pauses and silences.
Read Speech and Body Motion Synchrony of the
Speaker-Hearer (1971) In D. L. Horton and J. J. Jenkins (Eds.), Perception
of Language, Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 150–173.Condon, W. S.