Although the study of thought processes is sometimes considered to be the province of psychologists, the realm of internal dialogue can legitimately be studied as intrapersonal communication. Second thoughts, also termed self-talk or dissonance, can be discovered and examined in speech drafts, monologic letters, and diaries. For example, the…

An acoustic study of German focused on voice frequency at sentence-, turn-, and discourse-end in conversations. The data were drawn from short dialogues in which the same word occurs at the ends of utterances, in the middle of a turn, at the end of a turn, and at the end of a discourse. The dialogues were read 10 times by a male and a female…

Rhetorical force can be used to analyze interaction in organizational communication. In such an analysis, force is conceived of as being perceptual, arising out of interaction, aiding in understanding communication patterns, and increasing one's abilities both to anticipate actions and to plan or constrain one's actions. Rhetoric is a product of…

The language behavior of field-dependent and field-independent female college students was examined in three different communication conditions with respect to length and type of verbal output. The conditions were dialogue, warm monologue, and cold monologue. (Author/AM)

The assumption that "ideal" text grammars are valid descriptions of the schemata used by children to organize their recall of text was challenged in a study involving 150 elementary school children. The children, all with above-average reading ability, were classified as having one of three types of schemata: theme-initial (identifying…

This paper examines what devices a speaker of English uses to produce continuous language, and how such devices are used in English. (CLK)

Analysis of two- to five-year-olds' (N=26) responses to queries regarding utterances they made during free play indicated that social context interacted with response type, demonstrating that the initial utterance had a role in response determination and was important to the contingent query sequence. (Author/CB)

Investigates (in two phases) how coherence is cued between turns in conversations. Indicates that (1) turns were consistently paired well beyond chance, suggesting that explicit cues to connections between turns in conversations do exist; and (2) only lexical devices were found significantly more often in coherent than incoherent pairs. (NKA)

Discusses three studies which show that the first two of J. Searle's conditions are extremely important to maintain if a promise is to be made or understood. Supports the idea that promises do not by themselves obligate a speaker but are used to reaffirm previously existing, and often unstated, obligations. (NKA)

Describes the results of two studies indicating that people do not ordinarily process the complete literal or compositional interpretations of idiomatic expressions, and that people are automatically biased toward interpreting such language as idioms before deriving their intended literal meanings. (HTH)

This article discusses the discourse functions of relativization. Relativization is seen as an instance of the application of "bracketing" devices used in the organization of information. Syntactic structure is thus seen as a component of, and derivative from, discourse structure. (CLK)

A study investigated the involvement strategies present in the textual conversations of four graduate students enrolled in a fully online graduate course in language education. The students interacted through an asynchronous interactive computer conferencing system that allowed communication from two continents. Two 2-week ongoing discussions were…

The linguistic home environments of 10 language-delayed children and 10 linguistically normal children were compared using audiorecordings of parent-child dyads. Significant differences were found between the linguistic interactions of parents with a language-disordered child and parents with a linguistically normal child in all areas studied.…

Examines the two rules of intonation most commonly found in English language teaching textbooks: those concerning intonation in lists and intonation in questions. The article suggests that teachers and materials writers must provide learners with descriptions of intonation allowing them to understand the communicative significance of intonation…