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)

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…

A study of 10 typical women investigated the effect of fingerspelling task length on temporal characteristics and perceived naturalness of speech produced during simultaneous communication. Speech produced during simultaneous communication was rated as less natural and demonstrated increased interword interval, diphthong, work, and sentence…

Recent empirical findings have challenged Vygotsky's theory regarding the self-regulatory functions of children's private speech. This study hypothesized that semantic tasks and instructions to talk out loud would maximize private speech production. Results supported Vygotsky's notion that private speech does not disappear with age but "goes…

Maternal directives to 10- and 18-month-old children were analyzed for verbal and nonverbal aspects. The findings emphasize the multimodal nature of mothers' messages and the way language occurs in an action context and not as isolated output. There was no indication that verbal output replaces nonverbal at this age, but the verbal and nonverbal…

A study was undertaken to separate elements of maternal speech heavily influenced by the children's language levels from those representing the mothers' consistent style or strategy for "teaching" language. A striking similarity was found between speech mothers used with their daughters and that used with their daughters' friends. (MSE)

Examined large corpus of spontaneous English conversation for pronunciation of "the" and speech patterns immediately following. Found that speakers use "thiy" (versus "thuh") pronunciation to signal immediate suspension of speech to deal with a problem in production; problems were at many levels of production, including articulation, word…

Hypothesized that counselors would be rated higher on social influence, client satisfaction, and willingness to see the counselor when they matched client predicates than when they mismatched. Results indicated that knowledge of a client's primary representational system may be of help in increasing a counselor's social influence. (RC)

Twenty-two hyperactive children were more spontaneously talkative than controls during transitions and nonverbal tasks (nonelicited conditions), but less talkative when asked to tell stories (elicited conditions). Findings suggest that minimal stimulus input precipitate excessive verbal activity from hyperactive children, while stories requiring…

The measurement of personality characteristics via the analysis of verbal communication is of interest due to its unobtrusive, accessible, and objective nature. The Mahl Speech Disturbance Indices, a procedure for assessing anxiety on the basis of speech disturbance patterns, was examined to assess the nature and reliability of the indices and…

Disfluent phenomena such as pauses, hesitations, and repairs are investigated in 42 short samples of spontaneous speech of native French speakers and learners of French. It is found that native speakers attend to the construction of the referent, whereas learners are more concerned with syntactic construction. (Contains 14 references.) (Author/LB)

Thirty-six subjects were administered the 16PF and participated in a brief, unstructured interview. Paralinguistic behavior (fluency, duration and speech rate) were scored from tapes of the interviews and correlated to personality characteristics. Four significant relationships emerged revealing that fluency is related to adventurousness; duration…

Examines a grammar of conversation using three units of analysis: talk acts (statements, questions, agreements, and disagreements); turns at talk; and topic sequences. Rules covering the use of talk acts and definitions of units of analysis provide the basis for propositions about the location of categories of talk acts. (JMF)