This is the first report arising from a large-scale research project on the development of skills in English in the primary schools of Sydney, Australia. Specifically, it reports on a study of the extent of the relationship among the four communication skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) in a sample of 314 children and on a…

This review of the literature related to research on oral communication in the classroom pursues two issues: the types of oral contributions students make and whether those types are related to school achievement. In considering research on oral communication in classrooms, the paper looks at information that considers whether the communication…

The purpose of this research was to determine how interactive style influences effectiveness and interpersonal attraction in groups. After college student volunteers completed the Communicator Style Measure (CSM), 72 subjects were selected from three style profiles and assigned to triads that contained high, mid, and low communication style…

Twenty college students participated in an examination of the role of auditory feedback in the encoding of paralinguistic affect by adults. A dependent measure indicating the accuracy of paralinguistic communication of affect was obtained by comparing the level of affect that encoders intended to produce with ratings of vocal intonations from…

Ten college classes of speech communication students were used to examine the relationships among prior attitude, mode of presentation, and distortion of a high intensity (positive) persuasive communication. Three classes heard messages while four classes read messages. The remaining three classes were not exposed to messages and served as a…

Biological sex, social area, task area, and psychological sex were used as independent variables when 72 high school students in speech communication classes rated themselves and other members of small discussion groups. The results for males, females, and composite groups revealed that psychological sex was a more significant discriminating…

Student writers must be aware of the limits and needs of their readers if they are to transmit messages with clarity and precision. Psychological research in referential communication and the development of social-cognitive skills supports the theory that a writer's egocentrism and audience awareness affect composition. At the high school and…

A study of 28 high school journalists who had accepted the United States Army's invitation to visit Fort Knox was conducted to discover what their attitudes were toward military service, how those attitudes changed as a result of the tour, and how their attitudes were reflected in stories written upon returning from the trip. The students were…

A listener's inferences about why speakers say what they do can influence what the listener remembers. Psychologists studying memory for discourse have neglected to give attention to the source of the information to be remembered. In a study to determine what effects adding information has on remembering initial discourse, subjects listening to…

It was reasoned that if the right ear/left brain hemisphere is more efficient than the left ear/right hemisphere at extracting the meaning of a sentence, then verbatim information presented to the right ear may be more difficult to retrieve than verbatim information presented to the left ear immediately after the sentence is heard. This idea was…

The purpose of this study was to investigate nonverbal facial, body, and paralanguage cues to deception in children. A sample of 31 Hispanic and Black second and third grade students were videotaped while playing a color identification that required six honest and six deceptive verbal responses to a randomized stimulus presentation. Frame-by-frame…

A study was conducted to examine the contributions to the determination of individuals' orientation to change made by such factors as the individuals' demographic, social structural, personality, and cognitive characteristics. Data were collected in a field sample of 159 adult residents of New Athens, Illinois, a town of 2,000 inhabitants near…

This journal details the results of a symposium created to address the question, "What criteria should be used to judge the admissibility of evidence to support theoretical propositions regarding communication research?" Moderators Gary Cronkhite and Jo Liska provide both an introduction and a summary of the three position papers that form the…

This study compared the relative effectiveness of two communication-skills training models: Ivey's Microcounseling Paradigm and Carkhuff's Systematic Human Relations Training Model. After 107 educational psychology students volunteered to participate in the group that fit their schedules, treatments were randomly assigned. Pretesting and…

A great need exists for increased attention to standards of rigor in collecting sequential interaction data. As in any other research strategy, powerful statistics are not sufficient to organize data meaningfully. A knowledge of individuals, their relational histories, and communication are all necessary to insure proper conclusions about the…