Pre‐election perceptions of politicians and their promises as a function of the reference group match between speaker and listener

The Categorization‐Attribution‐Matching or CAM model of persuasion was tested in a field experiment, using an actual election to provide a natural manipulation of reference group similarity‐dissimilarity between speaker and audience. Just prior to the election, 344 Ss rated a set of campaign proposals, which were attributed either to the incumbent Prime Minister of Australia, or to the Leader of the Opposition. Half of the Ss received an unsupported, and half received a supported version of the message, thereby manipulating information content. Ss also rated the speaker, and indicated how they intended to vote. As predicted, speakers and speeches were rated as more credible and persuasive respectively, in the conditions where the political affiliation between source and target was matched, than in the mismatched conditions. And as predicted, the provision of additional information did not make a speaker more credible or a message more persuasive, when reference group salience was high.     

Audience reactions to the use of direct and personal disparaging humor in informative public address

In this study 126 subjects were exposed to one of three versions of a speech on “Effective Listening.” In one version no humor was added to the speech. In the other versions examples of direct and personal self and other‐disparaging humor were included in the presentation. Subjects rated the message and the message source on a number of dependent variables. Data, in general, suggest that those speakers who use direct and personal disparaging humor of any kind are rated as having a better sense of humor than those speakers who use no humor. Further, the use of self‐disparaging humor serves to reduce ratings of expertness while the use of other‐disparaging humor produced lower ratings of character.     

The armed forces radio service

Male and female university students and non‐students heard audiotapes containing a combination of two antagonistic persuasive speeches on the energy crisis: one with 12 obscene phrases, one with 12 parallel, non‐obscene phrases; one by a male speaker, one by a female; one pro‐environmentalists, one pro‐oil companies. Listener attitude was assessed on three dimensions using the Speech Dialect Attitudinal Scale. Analyses indicated that speakers were rated lower on Socio‐Intellectual Status and Aesthetic Quality when they used obscene language than when they did not; however, no difference was found on Dynamism. Other findings regarding speaker sex, listener group, and listener sex are discussed.     

浅析小学数学教师的幽默感

在数学教学中,教师富有哲理和情趣的幽默,能深深地感染和吸引学生,使自己教得轻松,学生学得愉快。如著名教育家斯雏特洛夫所说：“教育家最主要的,也是第一位的助手是幽默。”调查表明,学生喜欢富于幽默感的老师,而不喜欢表情冷漠呆板、语言寡淡无味的老师。幽默是一种艺术,一种以喻快的方式调整人际关系的艺术;幽默是一种力量,一种可以减轻压力,缓和师生关系,摆脱逆境的力量。数学教师在教学中要具有幽默感,才能更好的叫学生在和谐愉快的环境中,轻松自如的把枯燥的数学概念原理理解并能灵活应用。而数学教师的这种幽默是要不断的在生活中具有细腻的观察能力,还要有一种知识的联想能力,能有一种把数学和生活想结合的能力。     

Effects of Instructor Speech Rate on Student Affective Learning,Recall, and Perceptions of Nonverbal Immediacy,Credibility, and Clarity

Although research indicates that speech rate affects perceptions of speaker credibility as well as persuasiveness and information recall, research has failed to address how instructor speech rate affects student perceptions and learning. This study randomly assigned basic communication course students to one of three speech rate conditions (slow, moderate, fast), using a videotaped lesson by an instructor. Findings revealed significant differences for credibility, affective leaning, and nonverbal immediacy, but did not reveal significant differences for recall or clarity. Implications for instructional practice and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

A survey of native American serious drama from 1900 to 1918 1

This article seeks to isolate factors associated with effective and ineffective campaign speeches made by Adlai E. Stevenson in 1956. To distinguish effective from ineffective speeches, the author solicited the judgments of 105 campaign associates, Democratic and Republican politicians, journalists, and students of public address. Eighty‐seven replies were received and sixty‐four were sufficiently complete for analysis. There was high agreement that six speeches were effective and six ineffective.

Factors associated with effectiveness (their opposites with ineffectiveness) included the following: single issue discussed; relatively uncontroversial subject; constructive material emphasized and refutation de‐emphasized; responsive and sympathetic audience; speaker spent great deal of time editing and revising but little on basic draft; revisions were to clarify and identify with audience rather than to qualify remarks; emphasis on solutions rather than problems; introductions contained humor, irony, and satire; presence of direct ethical appeals; emphasis on values rather than needs; frequent alterations in text during delivery.

The author also found several factors common to both effective and ineffective speeches. These included, among others: foreign or domestic issue; size of audience and size of auditorium; length of speech of introduction; length of program prior to speech; logical organization; poor use of summaries and transitions.     

Patronizing young and elderly adults: Response strategies in a community setting

Within the context of an elaborated model of the communication predicament of aging, the effects of particular response strategies to patronizing, intergenerational talk were investigated with written vignettes depicting a community situation. Young adults (N = 222) evaluated a patronizing speaker more negatively than a non‐patronizing speaker, and they also judged both conversational partners to be more satisfied when patronizing speech was absent. As compared to cooperative responses, assertive responses from the patronizee led to evaluations that she was higher status, more controlling, less nurturing, and less satisfied. Patronizing individuals receiving an assertive response were evaluated as less in control and satisfied than when they received a cooperative response.     

The fluency principle: Why foreign accent strength negatively biases language attitudes

Two experiments tested the prediction that heavy foreign-accented speakers are evaluated more negatively than mild foreign-accented speakers because the former are perceived as more prototypical (i.e., representative) of their respective group and their speech disrupts listeners’ processing fluency (i.e., is more difficult to process). Participants listened to a mild or heavy Punjabi- (Study 1) or Mandarin-accented (Study 2) speaker. Compared to the mild-accented speaker, the heavy-accented speaker in both studies was attributed less status (but not solidarity), was perceived as more prototypical of their respective group, disrupted listeners’ processing fluency, and elicited a more negative affective reaction. The negative effects of accent strength on status were mediated by processing fluency and sequentially by processing fluency and affect, but not by prototypicality. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.     

Commercial Humor Enhancement of Program Enjoyment: Gender and Program Appeal As Mitigating Factors

Previous research has shown that if commercials showcase higher levels of humor, they can enhance the viewer's enjoyment of the program in which the commercials are contained. The theory of excitation transfer has been used to explain this phenomenon. This experimental research suggests some modifications to its application in this setting, suggesting that there must be an adequate level of TV program appeal initially for the appeal to be enhanced by commercials. In this study, men's enjoyment of a sitcom was enhanced when high humor commercials were included in the program.     

Studies in personal and social integration

Data from this experiment indicate that verbal approval of a prior speaker led to disruptive effects on certain speech patterns of a second speaker, both in a condition where the second speaker received no verbal approval and in a condition where the second speaker received verbal approval.

Subjects in these two conditions presented a significantly greater number of nonfluencies than did subjects in a condition where the prior speaker had not received verbal approval. Also, the estimates of speaking time indicate that greater anxiety may have existed in these two conditions.

Unlike some previous research, this experiment yielded no significant differences in speaking rate among the three conditions.     

The operation of congruity in an oral communication situation

The principle of congruity was proposed several years ago as an explanation for certain behavioral changes in communication situations. In this article the principle of congruity is offered as an explanation for attitude change in an oral communication situation. A predictive model is developed, taking a listener's attitude toward the speaker, the speech topic, the speaker's delivery, and the stylistic treatment of the speech topic as the significant variables in determining what the listener's attitude toward the speaker and the speech topic will be after listening to the speech. An experiment to test the predictive model is reported. The results generally support a principle of congruity in this type of oral communication situation.     

A preliminary study of the verbal behavior of speech fright

A general paradigm of a rating error theory is presented with a study testing relationships from the theory. The study aimed to discover the effects of source credibility, attitude valence, and task sensitization on trait errors in the evaluation of speeches. The main hypothesis of the study was an interaction effect on trait errors in the speech ratings. The results indicate a significant triple interaction, suggesting that when speech raters are sensitized to the task and are in favor of the view of the speaker, their trait errors on “ideas” will favor a low credibility speaker. The results are explained in terms of attraction and similarity.     

The Subtitle Effect: How Subtitle-Facilitated Perceptual Learning Can Make Subtitles (Seem) Less Necessary

In television and film production, speakers whose accents are judged difficult to understand are often subtitled, but viewers may question such judgments if they later perceive the subtitles as unnecessary. Such doubts can be ill founded, however. We report two experiments showing that the presence of bimodal subtitles (subtitles in the same language as the audio) on a given video clip can make subtitles seem less necessary for that clip and can improve comprehension of a second, unsubtitled clip of the same speaker. This, we argue, is because bimodal subtitles provide alternate access to the lexical information in the audio, thus facilitating perceptual learning of the subtitled speaker’s accent. This perceptual learning, through which listeners adjust their sound–phoneme mappings to accommodate the unfamiliar phoneme realizations underlying the speaker’s accent, can quickly make subtitles less necessary, potentially creating the illusion that they were never necessary—a phenomenon we call the “subtitle effect.”     

Perceptions of the authority of health information. Case study: digital interactive television and the Internet

As part of a Department of Health funded project nearly 2000 people were surveyed as to their use of two digital health information services, one on the Web and the other on digital interactive television (DiTV). The website was of a commercial company-Surgerydoor-and the DiTV service NHS based. This paper concentrates on the issue of trust in digital health information. Two of the main findings were that advertising was found to have an effect on trust, though the quality and type of advertising will impact in different ways on trustworthiness. DiTV subscribers who had either used the Living Health channel which carried NHS branded health information or had heard of the service, were more likely to say that the NHS was a symbol of trust for them compared with DiTV subscribers who had not used the service.     

Social criticism in the broadway theater during the inter‐war period

Rhetorical analysis of occasion, audience, speaker, and speech is applied to a type of speaking that was popular in America between 1763 and 1783. The resulting portrait provides background which can enrich the study of a particular election sermon. It demonstrates, moreover, that the annual sermons followed a distinct pattern, and that in so doing, they popularized and reinforced by repetition the major philosophical underpinnings of the Revolution.     

The effects of social status and social dialect on listener responses

The findings of this experimental study indicate that the response to the dialect speech of another is not unidimensional and that dialect is more likely a determinant of speaker ethos for middle social status persons than for high or low social status persons.     

A bibliography of rhetoric and public address for the year 1963

Multiple linear regression analysis was used to determine the relationship of six predictor variables to immediate comprehension and delayed retention of a lecture. Listening comprehension ability and extrinsic motivation accounted for a statistically significant proportion of the variance in immediate lecture comprehension scores; and initial information, aroused interest, and intrinsic interest were found to be the best predictors of ‘delayed retention of the materials. However, intrinsic interest was inversely related to delayed retention. The data suggested that although persons with high initial information and low intrinsic interest did not comprehend the lecture any better than others, they retained more of what they heard. Thus the variables which most influence lecture comprehension may not significantly influence the delayed retention of what was heard.     

社区译员“澄清”技巧的运用

与会议口译相比,社区口译是一种互动性更强的口译模式,因而给予译员更多的与讲者澄清信息的机会。社区译员应当知晓在什么情况下以及如何切当的打断讲者并澄清信息,以达到促进交流的目的。当社区译员遇到陌生的专业词汇、模糊信息、应客户要求或察觉讲话者明显口误时,应与讲者及时交流,避免造成进一步的信息混淆。     

Doors to diversity: The first amendment implications of telephone company video options under the telecommunications act of 1996

Video market entry options available to telephone companies under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 have First Amendment implications that will affect the constitutional value of telephone video. These entry options impose regulatory constraints upon providers and differ in potentials for provider speech, speaker access, and content diversity. The author concludes that the Act's open video system option best advances First Amendment interests in increased diversity of and access to speech.     

New beginnings

In his first public speech as Times Mirror's president and CEO, Mark Willes addressed the dedication luncheon for the Anderson School Management Education Complex at UCLA on June 12, 1995. As the luncheon keynote speaker, he outlined four basic principles he believes are the keys to being a successful company.