To quote ze wiki:
Body
Strength - Alters the damage done in melee, increases muscle mass (thicker muscle layer also resists damage more), and increases how much a creature can carry. Increasing strength, at least in adventurers, increases movement speed (albeit not as much as agility) due to better carrying capacity.
Agility - This attribute is directly related to a character's Speed and is also used in combat skills.
Toughness - Reduces physical damage. Also relates to defensive combat skills.
Endurance - Reduces the rate at which the adventurer becomes exhausted. Used in Wrestling.
Recuperation - Increases the rate of wound healing. Not as important as Toughness. Recuperation isn't that useful in adventurer mode since you usually have as much time to rest as you need assuming you can escape a situation alive.
Disease Resistance - Reduces the risk of disease. It isn't clear how useful this currently is in adventurer mode.
Strength, Agility, and Toughness are the Body attributes that most impact combat skills, and Endurance to a lesser extent.
Soul
Some of these are useful for adventure-mode-applicable skills, but some are totally useless.
Analytical Ability - Useful for certain crafting skills, the only one currently being Knapping.
Focus - Affects Archer, Ambusher, Observer.
Willpower - Fighter, Crutch Walker, Swimmer, and helps resist pain effects such as those caused by chipped bones.
Creativity - Currently completely useless in adventure mode. Normally it impacts crafting skills.
Intuition - Only helps with Observer.
Patience - Currently useless.
Memory - Records more of previously traveled areas when you return to them. Deletes all memory when you travel.
Linguistic Ability - Currently useless because adventurers don't have social skills.
Spatial Sense - Important. Affects combat skills, Ambusher, Crutch Walker, Swimmer, Observer, Knapping.
Musicality - Completely useless as of yet.
Kinesthetic Sense - Important. Combat skills, Crutch Walker, Swimming, Knapping,
Empathy - Might increase chance of persuading people to Join you.Verify
Social Awareness - Increases the number of followers you can have at a given "fame" level. Normally you start with a limit of two. Increasing this stat by one level raises that to three.
From
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.31:Adventurer_mode*Its still from DF2010 though, becouse ze 34.02 version hasnt been writen about.