The "speech anxiety peak experience" is the time during the speech event when the most anxiety is felt. A study tested the hypothesis that speakers would report higher communication anxiety levels at the beginning of the speech event rather than at the middle or end of the presentation. A Communication Apprehension Graph (CAG) was developed to…

The concept of rhetorical community is employed in this paper as a starting point for the study of community. Since the clarity of the concept "rhetorical community" is insufficient for purposes of building theories, the paper offers a more precise conceptual definition: a rhetorical community is a group of people who identify themselves with a…

The communicative dimensions of the labor crisis in Poland are examined in this paper in terms of Jurgen Habermas's theory of legitimation crisis and Niklas Luhmann's theory of power as a communication medium. Specifically, the paper analyzes three communication strategies that have marked the development and decline of the Soviet Union's control…

Part of a larger investigation of teacher-child-peer interactions among two- and three-year-old children in day care, this microanalytic study of toddler-initiated bids (attempts to communicate with caregivers) and teacher responses depicts in detail toddler-caregiver interaction. Subjects for the study were 25 males and 25 females between the…

A study examined perceptions of the appropriateness of nonverbal behaviors in dyadic interactions. A questionnaire was constructed containing descriptions of nine touching, posture, and personal space behaviors likely to occur in normal dyadic interactions, such as entering a room without knocking, leaning back and putting one's feet on a desk,…

Molefi K. Asante's Afrocentric methodology was used in analysing the rhetoric of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, writer Toni Morrison, and sociologist Robert Staples on the women's movement. Three conclusions were drawn from this analysis: (1) that the three rhetors noted more differences than similarities between black and white females; (2) that…

Scholars studying organizational communication tend to feel that all organizational problems are rooted in communication, but it is difficult to diagnose the particular problems of an organization without an explicit model of what constitutes a healthy organization. Organizational effectiveness is goal-related, multidimensional, perceived…

A study was conducted to examine self-disclosure as a relational control strategy in speech communication. Conversations of seven married couples were coded using L. E. Rogers-Millar's Relational Communication Control Coding Scheme and a self-disclosure coding system developed for the study. A message-by-message comparison of the codes from the…

A study investigated the use of nonverbal cues by male and female subjects during relatively pleasant and unpleasant interactions. Five nonverbal behaviors found to be effective in controlling both the quantity and the quality of interactions were examined: gaze, smiling, arm position, interpersonal distance, and personal space. It was expected…

Happy, neutral, and unhappy visual expressions were combined with positive, neutral, and negative intonations of positive, neutral, and negative messages to investigate congruent and incongruent verbal/nonverbal classroom communication. The 53 students in the study viewed pictures of their teacher, listened to a recording of their teacher, then…

Network analysis, a research methodology that uses interpersonal relationships as the unit of analysis in identifying communication structures, was used in a study of college classroom communication to determine what communication network factors were associated with student grades. Questionnaires asking for student perceptions of their…

In a study of the role of internal communication as a contributor to total organizational effectiveness, 300 employees of a large manufacturing plant were surveyed to determine the relationship between supervisory communication and employee noninjury medical visits to the company hospital. The survey form consisted of 61 items requesting…

Noting that rhetorical critics have ignored the study of nonwestern movements and have failed to construct theories that help to explain and interpret the rhetorical form of such movements, this paper synthesizes concepts from rhetorical theory and anthropology to explain the linguistic process that made up the 1978 Israeli peace movement. The…

The work of Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard on life-cycle leadership was compared and contrasted to three studies on group phase theories. The studies on group phases were conducted by Robert Bales and Fred Strodtbeck in 1951, Thomas Scheidel and Laura Crowell in 1964, and B. Aubrey Fisher in 1970. The two theoretical approaches were found to…

Because many college communication departments employ graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) to provide instruction in undergraduate courses, a study was conducted to determine how much inservice training departments provide their GTAs to prepare them for effective teaching. A questionnaire was completed by 136 speech communication departments across…