Communication as we have defined it in a previous paper (Hooper, Roberts, Hinchliffe&Vaughan, 1977) consists of considerably more than the words which are spoken. The flow of speech is accompanied by many paralinguistic phenomena which both facilitate and inhibit the patterns of communication between people. Speech flow has always been one of the classical ways by which the depressed patient has been identified clinically. Along with the negative and self‐devaluing speech content (for which there is a good deal of evidence, e.g. Weintraub&Aronson, 1967) the speech flow of the depressed person has been thought of as considerably disrupted by long pauses and a low speech rate. Obviously, then, this domain of communication has been particularly important for the clinician in deciding whether or not the person in front of him is clinically depresse