According to Lev Vygotsky, private speech has a functional value for the child during problem solving. As children grow older, private speech is thought to become inner, non-observable speech. Both private and inner speech are abbreviated. A study tested the hypothesis of the progressive abbreviation of private speech. Private speech data were…

A study was conducted to begin the process of determining the preferences of coaches and/or teams for attending specific national debate tournaments. Ninety-six respondents participated in the study either through an oral survey or a follow-up questionnaire administered at two different national tournaments. The subjects included the directors of…

This paper focuses on the organizational group, noting the lack of an integrated theoretical base, describing the nature of group behavior theories, and suggesting the employment of a metatheory framework to improve both the theoretical integration and the practical application of group behavior research. The paper first considers four general…

This study was conducted to demonstrate that a context-dependent discrimination can produce learning difficulty in a pseudo-spectrogram reading task and to look at what contribution segmentation makes to that difficulty. Experiment one involved 10 subjects recruited from the University of Pittsburgh, who were shown pseudo-spectrogram patterns and…

A study combined direct observation with self-report measures in examining both communication characteristics and functional activities of managers to identify how managers really communicate. Subjects were 120 supervisors from a financial institution, a state agency, a medium-sized manufacturing plant, a campus police department, and the Navy and…

A study investigated the speaking habits of the general public from the Albany, Schenectady, and Troy (New York) area in the spring and fall of 1984. Student interviewers completed interviews with 478 residents 18 years or older to find out how many times the respondent had given speeches in the past two years and under what circumstances. The…

A study explored the degree to which people can capture the meaning of logical terms, using mental imagery. It was then hypothesized that: (1) subjects generally would fail to express logical relationships accurately, and (2) abstract images would be more difficult to capture than would concrete ones. Subjects, 25 college students, were asked to…

Recent models of metadiscourse proposed by Joseph M. Williams and William J. Vande Kopple are collections of disparate structures instead of principled systems--they do not contain rules to explain the interdependencies of their categories. Metadiscourse should be redefined as a category within the larger context of speech act theory.…

"Imagined interactions," which refer to a cognitive process whereby individuals imagine themselves having conversations with significant others, captures a dimension of intrapersonal communication barely understood by communication researchers. To examine this multifunctional concept, a study considered the role of "imagined…

This bibliography on qualitative research methods in speech communication contains 213 entries grouped into three categories: (1) books; (2) speech communication journal articles; and (3) social science journal articles and sections in books. (SR)

Although research on argumentativeness appears to confirm the centuries-old "commonsense knowledge" that successful arguers enjoy arguing and are adept at remaining "cool and rational" during an argument, the empirical research itself is based on normative assumptions that underlie this Cartesian "commonsense…

As part of an ongoing study of The Mediation Project at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst a mediation process was observed and recorded, followed by a group interview including both disputants and mediators. The two disputants had lived together for two years and had made several purchases together. They participated in the mediation…

To examine why public relations agency-client relationships frequently break down, a study investigated the sources of conflict between 25 southern California public relations agencies and their clients by having 30 agent/client pairs complete questionnaires. Of the 25 agencies, 12 agreed to participate; the 30 pairs were obtained because some…

This study investigated questions asked during two types of mother-child interaction and demonstrated ways in which mother-child dyads may structure their interactions differently in different settings. Participants were 16 first-born girls between 2.5 and 3.5 years of age who were videotaped on four occasions when they played in their home for 15…

A study was conducted to provide a comparative analysis of the 1984 presidential primary and general election debates, specifically in terms of the formats imposed upon them and the emergent candidate verbal behaviors. Ten Democratic nationally televised primary debates and three bipartisan nationally televised General Election debates were…