The Dance of the Neonates

Abstract

In the 1960s and 1970s, W.S. Condon and Adam Kendon started to publish work on non-verbal behaviour and ‘interactional synchrony’ (see for example, Condon & Ogston, 1966, and Kendon, 1970). Their intriguing empirical work was suggesting that the body movements of interacting people are synchronised in an extraordinarily complex way. Furthermore, they claimed that these body movements are coordinated with the rhythms of speech. The notion of interactional synchrony became a controversial issue in the literature of developmental psychology when Condon and Sander published the paper that is summarised here, claiming that the same sorts of synchronies between speech and non-verbal behaviour could be detected even in new-born babies.