14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Towards an Integrated Theory of Nonverbal Communication

John Laver

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

This paper reviews the methodological structure of paralinguistic research as a field, identifying significant contributors over the past fifty years, with illustrative references to influential books, and looking ahead to research methodologies where further progess may be made. It proposes that there were two waves of research in the last half-century, from 1950 to 1975, and 1975 to the present. Since 1975, multidisciplinary research into nonverbal communication has accelerated greatly, to the point where it forms a new interdisciplinary field. A promising paradigm for further development lies in the experimental manipulation of individual features of multi-channel syndromes of paralinguistic behaviour. A number of research agendas enabled by this paradigm are then characterised.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Laver, John (1999): "Towards an integrated theory of nonverbal communication", In ICPhS-14, 2433-2436.