Although much interest has been generated regarding the functions speaking centers serve and the effects consultations can have, minimal research has addressed the dynamics of consultations themselves. This study documents what speaking center clients and consultants identify as barriers in consultations and how they address them. Analysis of…

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is increasingly being advocated as the preferred approach to practice in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The EBP process involves multiple steps. The asking of a well-built question is the first step in the quest for answers. At the same time it is also often the first stumbling block for…

Extending past research, the present study provides an initial examination of the relationship between trait-like personality variables, communicator style, and individual listening preferences. A series of canonical correlations were run to ascertain to what degree certain communication preferences and trait-like personality variables are related…

Classroom observations are an important source of information about teaching and about the practice of particular teachers. The paper considers the value placed on talk as opposed to silence in this context and suggests that a cultural bias towards talk means that silence is commonly perceived negatively. The paper is based on a qualitative…

One of the goals for an undergraduate Communication Research Methods class is that students be able to read quantitative communication research from scholarly journals, identify the variables being studied, and understand the methodology employed. This sounds simple enough, but most students come into the class having never even seen a scholarly…

Variations in group co-construction of knowledge and the extent to which participants engaged in negotiating meaning were directly related to instruction. The authors examined social interaction resulting from controlled variation in instruction using a counter-balanced design in two professional development courses for teachers. Both courses were…

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights…

Different speakers may pronounce the same sounds very differently, yet listeners have little difficulty perceiving speech accurately. Recent research suggests that listeners adjust their preexisting phonemic categories to accommodate speakers' pronunciations ("perceptual learning"). In some cases, these adjustments appear to reflect general…

There has been an increasing interest in the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in problem-based learning. One line of research has been to introduce synchronous, or simultaneous, communication attempting to create text-based digital real-time interaction. Compared with face-to-face (F2F) communication, CMC may be a poorer medium…

In light of today's large amount of written workplace communication, this study attempted to reveal information regarding the quality in which business messages are encoded on the job. Data were gathered through a questionnaire administered to a sample of 1994-2004 MBA graduates of three AACSB-accredited programs. Findings suggest that business…

In this study, demand/withdraw patterns and feeling caught were tested as mediators of family communication patterns and young adults' mental well-being. Participants included 567 young adults from divorced and nondivorced families. For young adults in nondivorced families, family conversation orientations had both a positive, direct effect on…

Purpose: This study provides preliminary reference data for speech and articulatory rates of school-age children in conversational and narrative speaking contexts. Method: Participants included 36 typically developing children in 3 groups of 12 participants at ages 7, 9, and 11 years. Conversational and narrative speech rates were measured in…

This study uses social network analysis (SNA) in an innovative way to describe interaction and explain how interaction influences sense of community of students in online learning environments. The findings reveal differences on sense of community between two similarly structured online courses, and show unique interaction patterns for students in…

Fifty-eight principals participated in this pilot study designed to examine the nature of school administrators' current practices in written communication. Work samples were examined against ISLLC standards that call for competency in facilitating vision, communicating culture and instruction, managing the organization, developing collaboration…

The present paper integrates the results of experimental studies in which cognitive differences between stuttering and nonstuttering adults were investigated. In a monitoring experiment it was found that persons who stutter encode semantic information more slowly than nonstuttering persons. In dual-task experiments the two groups were compared in…