The extent of class participation of a group of college women is measured, and attitudes associated with high participation are identified. The following are studied: (1) Are high participant women (HPW) more assertive than low participant women (LPW)? (2) Do HPW hold more liberal views on women's roles than LPW? and (3) Do HPW have a more…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles deal with the following topics: (1) dynamics of communication and trust as school board and superintendent prepare for public meeting; (2) therapeutic discourse; (3) manipulation in interpersonal relationships; (4)…

A two-session experiment was conducted to test the relationship of self-schemata to the processing of attitudinal information. In Session I, subjects were classified as either Religious (n=20) or Legal (n=19) in their schemata, using weighted response times to personality trait words on slides. In Session II, these subjects heard one of four…

This paper demonstrates the compatability of Aristotle's Four Causes (material, formal, efficient, and final) and George Campbell's Four Forms of Discourse (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) and synthesizes them to form an ordered yet flexible writing model that can be used in composition instruction. Within the context of…

The key question underlying this study was: What does the untrained population know about public speaking? The study thus focused on resolving the conflict between folk speech theory, or knowledge that students gain informally, and formal academic speech theory. An Inventory of Public Speaking Principles was devised to test six hypotheses which…

Linguistic cues evoke prestructured beliefs in people's minds regarding the nature and causes of public problems. Political language can shape people's opinions and thereby shape events. There appear to be two beliefs or myths that people use to explain social problems: the first sees the sufferer as responsible for his own plight in a basically…

Historical incidents, photographs of sheet music, cartoons, and advertisements are employed to study language in this textbook. The text, suggestions, and quoted material in the book are to be used not only for the study of language but also as sources for writing. It is recommended that journal entries, more fresh and spontaneous than formal…

Instructional technology involves the use of devices or systematic patterns of thought to influence behavioral patterns in educational situations. Technology by its nature requires uniform responses which, in liberal arts program in communications, demand certain preconditions. First, the human communication discipline must obtain pertinent…

Urban environments are characterized by crowding, heterogeneous groups, disparities in opportunity between inner city and suburbia, concentrated hostility, complexity in organizational communication factors, depersonalization, dependence on mass communication, and high interdependence requiring balancing of conflicting goals. While communication…

In intercollegiate debate, negative debaters must be prepared with a variety of approaches to differing affirmative cases and must adapt to particular affirmative cases they meet. Successful negative debaters cannot determine their strategy until the presentation of the first affirmative speech or, in cross-examination debates, until after…

Three environmental elements--messages, events, and perceived consequences of choices--cause varying amounts of stress on an individual and affect his capacity to deal with his environment. There is a nonmonotonic relationship between environmental pressures ("event press") and persuasibility in that the number and importance of…

This handbook contains basic resource material for debating significant changes in the United States jury system. Chapter 1 outlines available sources of information for preliminary research. Chapters 2 and 3 present background information on the federal and state court systems and the jury system. Chapter 4 discusses an interpretation of the…

Frequently speakers confront hostile groups and audiences with opposite points of view. Public communicators faced with this dilemma can choose not to address the group or, in speaking, can avoid points of contention, but a third more subtle alternative used is deliberate ambiguity or vagueness, a rhetorical strategy known as equivocation. But do…

Produced by a staff of teachers working on curriculum teams for Project PACESETTER, this secondary school English curriculum guide organizes materials into behavioral objectives which include two major components: the objective statement, which specifies the behavioral variable, and activities, which outline what the student should do to attain…

This paper deals with the computer's production and recognition of sentences in a connected discourse and its application to computer assisted instruction. Studies of textual properties in real discourses have been carried out at the paragraph level. The theoretical concepts of representing paragraph content in terms of (1) the factual data…