Sixty undergraduate women interacted in dyads with female experimental confederates in a study of the interactive effects of social attributions and environmental controllability on interpersonal assertion. The environment was systematically varied on two dimensions of social power or control: (1) social responsiveness of the confederate, and (2)…

Part of a larger investigation of the rhetorical character of the presidencies of Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter, this report concentrates on the presidents' linguistic styles and their semantic choices. The first half of the report discusses the background of the study and the development of a computerized language analysis…

Presents a study examining the effect of high and low communication apprehension in conjunction with social and personal settings upon verbal behavior. Stepwise multiple discriminant analysis of the data indicates several language variables that discriminate between the high apprehensive-personal setting group and the remaining groups. (JMF)

A study was conducted to examine the differences in language usage between males and females in the specific moral domain of conflict resolution and rationales for decisions. The subjects, 39 female and 21 male college students, were given an imaginary conflict scenario to resolve, asked how the conflict should be resolved, what the rationales…

Examined the speech patterns of three- to eight-year-old children. Results showed that the children most often used "ah" phenomena and unfilled pauses as do adults. "Ah" phenomena showed a significant increase with age, especially between five and six among the females. (SRT)

Outlines conceptual distinction among avoidance, cooperation, and competitive conflict resolution strategies used by marital partners. Couples (N=43) were audiotaped as they discussed previous disagreements. Found the temporal aspects of speech, including turn-taking and interruptions, need to be considered in the study of couples' conflict…

A study sought to determine what relationships existed between speech rate, speech pitch variation, speech loudness, and the personality assessments made by listeners. The subjects, 214 undergraduate speech communication students, listened to one of eight tape recordings made by a male speaker to represent all the combinations of the three…

A study compared mothers' and fathers' speech patterns when speaking to preschool children, particularly utterance length, sentence types, and word frequencies. All of the children attended a nursery school with a student population of 136 in a large urban area in the Southwest. Volunteer subjects, 28 mothers and 28 fathers of 28 children who…

Rating scales were developed and applied to evaluate deferential/nondeferential language users. Participants were 1,262 college students in small discussion groups containing two experimenter's confederates who used either deferential or nondeferential language. The characteristics of deferential language users were questioning/tentative behavior,…

The intent of this study was to determine the extent to which preschool children's speech to self, their private speech, was differentiated from their social speech. Ten randomly chosen preschool children, six boys and four girls with a median age of 56 months, were observed in conditions supportive of oral communication (free play), and in…

Sixty half-hour family discussions generated by the "revealed differences technique" were analyzed to determine the emotional intensity and quality (friendliness/attacking) of messages between individuals in families with schizophrenic and "normal" sons. Thirty families in each situation (schizophrenic/normal) were matched for comparison. Both…

In an experiment studying the relationship between reciprocity and compensation in dyadic communication, 96 male college students were videotaped during hypothetical problem solving situations. An attitude scale was used to manipulate subjects' impressions of mutual similarity. Time was used to test development in the dependent variables…