The claim that nonverbal cues provide more information than the linguistic content of a conversational exchange (the Mehrabian Conjecture) has been widely cited and equally widely disputed, mainly on methodological grounds. Most studies that have tested the Conjecture have used individual words or short phrases spoken by actors imitating emotions. While cue recognition is certainly important, speech evolved to manage interactions and relationships rather than simple information exchange. In a cross-cultural design, we tested participants’ ability to identify the quality of the interaction (rapport) in naturalistic third party conversations in their own and a less familiar language, using full auditory content versus audio clips whose verbal content has been digitally altered to differing extents. We found that, using nonverbal content alone, people are 75–90% as accurate as they are with full audio cues in identifying positive vs negative relationships, and 45–53% as accurate in identifying eight different relationship types. The results broadly support Mehrabian’s claim that a significant amount of information about others’ social relationships is conveyed in the nonverbal component of speech.

非语言线索比对话交流的语言内容提供更多信息的说法（梅赫拉比猜想）已被广泛引用并同样受到广泛争议，主要是基于方法论。大多数测试该猜想的研究都使用了模仿情绪的演员所说的单个单词或短语。虽然提示识别当然很重要，但语音演变为管理交互和关系，而不是简单的信息交换。在跨文化设计中，我们测试了参与者在自然主义第三方对话中以他们自己和不太熟悉的语言识别交互（融洽）质量的能力，使用完整的听觉内容与口头内容已被数字化改变的音频剪辑到不同程度。我们发现，仅使用非语言内容，人们在识别正面和负面关系方面的准确率与拥有完整音频提示的准确率一样高 75-90%，在识别八种不同关系类型方面的准确率是 45-53%。结果广泛支持 Mehrabian 的说法，即关于他人社会关系的大量信息是在言语的非语言成分中传达的。