Numerous experimental and theoretical studies have established that intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution in isolated molecules has a hierarchical tier structure. The tier structure implies strong correlations between the energy level motions of a quantum system and its intensity-weighted spectrum. A measure, which explicitly accounts for this correlation, was first introduced by one of us as a sensitive probe of phase space localization. It correlates eigenlevel velocities with the overlap intensities between the eigenstates and some localized state of interest. In this work we investigate the usefulness of the correlator in understanding the classical-quantum correspondence of effective spectroscopic Hamiltonians. Application to a model two dimensional effective spectroscopic Hamiltonian shows that the correlation measure can provide information about the terms in the molecular Hamiltonian which play an important role in an energy range of interest and the character of the dynamics. Moreover, the correlation function is capable of highlighting relevant phase space structures including the local resonance features associated with a specific bright state. In addition to being ideally suited for multidimensional systems with a large density of states, the measure can also be used to gain insights into phase space transport and localization. It is argued that the overlap intensity-level velocity correlation function provides a novel way of studying vibrational energy redistribution in isolated molecules. The correlation function is ideally suited to analyzing the parametric spectra of molecules in external fields.