Questionnaires were completed by 169 accountants and 146 bankers in a study conducted to ascertain what communication tasks are performed frequently in accounting and banking and what competencies are needed for success in performing these tasks. The results indicated that all communication tasks were performed on an almost daily to almost weekly…

A study was conducted to investigate the success of women contestants in Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) debate. The study sought to determine whether (1) CEDA is a more attractive debate activity for women, (2) men are more successful in CEDA debate than women, (3) the gender mix of debate teams favors all-male teams over all-female…

A 328-item checklist, suitable for the self-reporting of responses to any stimulus event, was administered to 107 upper division college students in an attempt to investigate the physiological-cognitive-emotional responses to defense arousing communication and to discover a greater range of the key features of the phenomena of…

Although the listening construct has been defined more widely in order to deal with the issue of lecture retention, these wider definitions suffer from serious conceptual and methodological problems, such as the assumption that receiving behavior is the same regardless of differing situations and messages. However, the literature would indicate…

The rhetorical appropriateness of two of Shirley Chisholm's persuasive speeches on women's liberation were assessed using Afrocentric criteria for speech criticism developed by Molefi K. Asante (1979). The speeches addressed the controversy of whether the women's liberation movement was appropriate for women of minority cultures in the United…

The primary purpose of this study was to describe the linguistic behavior exhibited by a female subject (age 2 years, 4 months) during naturally occurring social interaction with children of different ages. Verbal and nonverbal behavior were studied; of additional interest were variables influencing the emergence of linguistic behavior. Data were…

A study was conducted to examine the differences in language usage between males and females in the specific moral domain of conflict resolution and rationales for decisions. The subjects, 39 female and 21 male college students, were given an imaginary conflict scenario to resolve, asked how the conflict should be resolved, what the rationales…

An experiment was designed to test an instrument that could assist writers and editors in selecting strategies for improving the comprehensibility of written instructions. In addition, the study examined how successful professional writers are in improving passages selected for difficulty. The subjects, 150 experienced writers, were given an…

A wide range of interesting observations of the past decade, which may now cast their shadow as the health communication paradigm of the forthcoming decade, can be clarified and correlated. One example of effective communication therapy was Norman Cousins's hospitalization with the crippling disease, "ankylosing spondylitis." Using large doses of…

With the goal of generating research questions about teacher effectiveness, the first half of this paper deals with literature investigating teachers' nonverbal behavior in the classroom. This review lends support to the following ideas: (1) nonverbal cues affect relationship quality; (2) the more positive the teacher feedback to students, the…

A study was conducted (1) to investigate factors that influence an instructor's choice of behavior when confronted with incidents of students' poor communication performance, and (2) to demonstrate how attribution theory can be used as a vehicle for describing and understanding the causes of instructor reactions or behaviors. The study sought to…

The four papers in this collection were drawn from a symposium convened to review the state of the art in speaking and listening assessment at all educational levels and to suggest strategies for addressing the technical issues, particularly those relating to test bias and the use of rating scales, that speaking and listening assessors often face.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the communication behavior of Asian American women who held nontraditional, male-dominated jobs. Two hundred and eighty seven Asian American women of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Philippino descent in both traditional and nontraditional occupations were interviewed in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.…

A study was conducted to determine the meanings people give to certain words that describe different groups of people. Participants indicated the chronological age they have in mind when using 15 age terms, including baby, senior citizen, adolescent, infant, mature, elderly, youth, and old. The 150 replies to the questionnaire came from college…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 10 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the importance of written communication in business as viewed by executives in a metropolitan area, (2) communication processes and organizational structure as mechanisms of…