Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to examine the impact of instruction order on the speech production response when adopting higher effort speaking styles, specifically loud and clear speech. Method: Speech intensity, lip aperture range, and speech rate data were collected from 24 talkers who repeated the utterance "Buy Bobby a…

Preschool and kindergarten teachers must make decisions everyday about how much to allow their children to talk out loud to themselves during various classroom activities. The present study examines the effects of children's private speech use on task performance for a group of behaviorally at-risk children and a group of control children during a…

Examination of stereotypes about polite speech found that women are expected to speak more politely than men regardless of sex of addressee topic. Men are expected to use different forms for requests for masculine, feminine, and neutral actions and different forms of requests for male and female addressees. (CMG)

Considers utterances that appear to violate the interdependence assumed by the interactionist view, entering the stream of behavior at peculiar and unnatural places, producing communicative effects but no dialogue. Self-talk, imprecations, and response cries are discussed. (EJS)

Part 13 of a continuing series. (SK)

This study involved 208 children and their mothers. It tested the effect on the child's self-esteem of the way the mother interacts verbally with the child. In general, descriptive responses are more effective than judgmental ones. (Author)

The research findings of profane language usage need to be extended so that more may be learned about human communication. In order to establish profane language usage norms, eighty-six university students were asked to estimate their profane language usage in each of three categories (excretory, religious, and sexual) in reference to three…

This paper discusses the phenomenon of elective mutism as a learned response and presents some techniques whereby speech can be elicited from the electively mute child. (Author)

Reprints from: Claire Falk Etaugh, Department of Psychology, Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois 61606.

Based upon assumptions of Gestalt Therapy, an objective, reliable scoring system for analyzing a specific aspect of verbal behavior, avoidant verbalization, was developed. (Author)

This study examines the conversational behaviors of subjects with differing verbal abilities within a three-person group setting. According to a score on the Verbal Reticence Scale (Lustig, 1974), 108 subjects were rated as highly verbal, moderately verbal, or verbally reticent. From these classifications, smaller groups were selected at random to…

The purposes of this study were to examine (1) the extent to which three-year-old children converged noncontent speech to that of adults and (2) whether a talkativeness-reticence factor influenced the degree of convergence. Four three-year-old girls individually interacted with six to eight unfamiliar adults in free-play settings. From…