Examines the relationship between social perceptions (social attractiveness and speaker competence and dominance) and compliance with requests for help among college students. Finds that speech rate and other nonverbal behaviors may effect compliance by increasing the speaker's social attractiveness, creating obligations to comply, or exerting…

Analyses the rhetorical choices of President George Bush in speeches announcing military action in Panama and Iraq. Demonstrates how understanding those choices can educate students participating in extemporaneous speaking. (SR)

Interviews with 39 vocational administrators and 73 instructors who worked with them revealed that successful administrators combined several forms of communication, used communication in a wide range of contexts, and integrated communication with a wide variety of leadership attributes. (SK)

Focuses on organizational communication and compares results with previous peer rankings. Finds support for the notion that a correlation exists between the publication rates of individuals and institutions in communication journals and the impression of quality by peers in the field. (RS)

Studies the construction of coherent narrations of events in a picture storybook by children and adults. Applies a causal network discourse analysis. Analyzes the structure and content of the network representation of the main character. Reveals differences in content and structure of the narratives. (HB)

Analyzes the requests for clarification used by instruction receivers. Discusses insights about the interactive nature of communication success and failure with regard to route directions. Provides validation for a model of message comprehension. (HB)

Tests the relationship between corporation performance and the readability of annual reports. Shows that annual reports of good performers were easier to read than those of poor performers--good performers used strong writing, unlike poor performers but did not use significantly more jargon or modifiers. (SR)

Argues that effects of emotional visuals accompanying television news broadcasts are reflected not in the exact recall of text but through specific kinds of errors in recall and the relation of these errors to certain parts of the item. (SR)

Presents a language approach to outgroup homogeneity and discrimination between gender groups. Finds outgroup discrimination was confined to female respondents; outgroup discrimination resulted more from repetition of biased statements than from differential abstraction; and discrimination was strongest for topics for which the most distinctive…

Presents the experiences of four researchers who successfully gained access to organizations. (RS)

Determines whether attitudinal relevance substantially affects the magnitude of the correlation between attitudes and behavior and whether the effects are content free. Finds a strong overall attitude-behavior relationship when methodological artifacts are eliminated. Discusses implications for communication theory and practice. (RS)

Finds that facts from news stories presented by newspaper or computer screen were recalled at a significantly higher level than were facts from the same stories when presented via radio or television. (SR)

Examines the predisposition of Aboriginals to use sign language in place of speech and presents observations of the use of signs in everyday interaction along with a discussion on how this tendency to communicate gesturally may relate to the use of other forms of communication. (six references) (GLR)

Reports on a study which examined communication patterns of three related professional groups--editors, book reviewers, and scholars of children's literature. Findings are presented on the boundary-spanning communication structure and its formal and informal components, differences between the professions, differences between central and…

Investigates conversation between elderly individuals and college students as the arena for assembling, displaying, and negotiating an elderly identity of frailty. Finds that frailty is one frame through which the experience and identities of aging persons may be defined. Finds that interpersonal strategies may ameliorate or aggravate the tension…