Probes the tension between reasons to recognize differences among women and potential dangers inherent in emphasizing women's diversity, focusing on women and their communication. Suggests embracing this tension. Offers concrete instructional principles and practices (for communication courses) to cultivate respect for diversity and appreciation…

Presents a variationist study in the speech of bilingual Cajuns in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. Results show a complex interrelationship of age, gender, and social network. One major finding was a v-shaped age pattern (the young show a level of usage closer to the older generation) rather than the generational model that is expected. (Author/VWL)

Investigated functional differences between the accent-lending rise followed by sustained level pitch (10) and combined accent-lending rise and final rise (12) in Dutch. Thirty individuals were presented with short utterances bearing either a 10 or 12 contour. Results indicated that 10 is not readily interpreted as a question, so 10 may help…

Examined mandibular correlates of prosodic control in nonread dialog exchange involving repeated corrections. Articulatory and acoustic data were collected from four American English speakers at an x-ray laboratory, measuring jaw opening. Results suggested a local and global use of the jaw-opening gesture to produce both linguistic or…

Examines the role of context effects in the processing of homophones in Chinese and Chinese-English bilingual speech. Finds that prior sentence context has an early effect on the disambiguation of various homophone meanings in both monolingual and bilingual situations. Accounts for results by interactive activation models of lexical processing.…

Describes the creation of an interpersonal skill assessment instrument for the basic course by faculty at the speech communication faculty at Collin County Community College. Explains why this approach has been successful for the faculty. Demonstrates how other institutions can benefit from this department's approach. (RS)

Notes that innovations in technology have greatly enhanced educators' abilities to incorporate instruction in written and oral communication skills in the accounting curriculum. Finds that practitioners agree with the new writing requirements of the CPA (Certified Public Account) exam, and endorse the use of information technology in preparing…

A study investigated the effectiveness of requests for clarification by 25 adults with hearing impairments and of partner responses in overcoming communication breakdowns. Nonspecific clarification requests, requests for the repetition of a specific constituent, and request for confirmation by participants with hearing losses were effective in…

Two intra-modal immediate repetition priming experiments ask whether speech inputs can link directly to abstract underlying representations, or whether access is mediated via intervening "access representations" of each word's surface phonetic form. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the role of gesture in instruction giving and receiving during a cooking lesson, focusing on the recipient and his or her orientation to verbal and embodied instruction-giving. Analyzes three relevant next actions that can follow the instruct turn (embodied instruct receipt tokens, embodied repetitions of the embodied instruct, and…

Presents an account of developmental data regarding the acquisition of syllable types. Data come from a longitudinal corpus of phonetically transcribed speech of 12 children acquiring Dutch as their first language. (Author/VWL)

Investigates how the purpose of three types of business and technical documents (instructions, annual reports, and sales promotional letters) affects the syntactical and rhetorical choices authors make in writing these documents. Outlines partial syntactical and rhetorical "fingerprints" of these documents to offer students norms they can go by in…

Explored the variation in the resistance that lingual and nonlingual consonants exhibit to coarticulation by following vowels in the schwa+CV disyllables of two native speakers of English. (Author/VWL)

Presents a follow-up study to further assess the extent to which reticent participants subscribe to beliefs outlined in prior research and to further test the ability of the Penn State program to alter those beliefs. Reveals significant pretreatment differences between reticent and comparison group participants on 7 of 16 beliefs. Shows…

Presents a theoretical statement on the nature of reticence that affirms, in part, Gerald M. Phillips' conceptualization in prior research but, grounded in new empirical data, refines and revises the construct. Proposes a new definition and a six-component model of reticence. Discusses theoretical and treatment implications. (SR)