John Waite Bowers

Classroom communication apprehension: A survey

A survey study of 402 undergraduate students at a midwestern state university explored the experience of “classroom communication apprehension” and its antecedents and consequences. Of the sample, 70% reported having the experience, at least occasionally, and this proportion is remarkably consistent across demographic subclasses. Correlates of the experience suggest ways in which teachers, administrators, and students might alleviate the problem.

Another stab at “meaning”: Concreteness, iconicity, and conventionality

This study attempts a new approach to the problem of “meaning.” The authors are concerned primarily with meanings as they are encountered by decoders rather than as they are devised by encoders, and they focus almost exclusively on cognitive rather than on emotional aspects of meaning. A scheme comprising three dimensions—concreteness, iconicity, and conventionality—is proposed as a model for relating symbols to their concepts and their users. Emphasis is on ease or difficulty of decoding symbols in the cognitive realm. Experimentation is recommended for testing the hypotheses advanced in this approach.

Effects of Intensity, Immediacy and Diversity Upon Receiver Attitudes Toward a Belief-Discrepant Message and Its Source

ABSTRACT During the last fifteen years, over fifty studies have been done on the attitudinal consequences of three language variables: language intensity, verbal immediacy and lexical diversity. We recently constructed a comprehensive theory integrating previous research on these variables which comprises 26 axioms, 66 novel theorems and a causal model. The research reported here is an initial test of a part of the causal model and selected theorems; 183 persons participated. Each read one of eight versions of a message pretested for belief discrepancy. The versions represented orthogonal combinations of two levels (high versus low) of each of the three language variables. Subjects responded to 24 seven-interval scales which measured their judgments of the communicator and her message. Results indicate that diversity is directly related to judgments of competence, trustworthiness, predictability, similarity and receiver favourableness toward the belief-discrepant message. Immediacy is inversely related to judgments of competence at low diversity and of trustworthiness at high diversity. Immediacy is inversely related to liking when intensity is high. Intensity is directly related to predictability when immediacy is low. The results partially confirm our predictions. They indicate also that diversity is a more powerful determinant of receiver judgments and attitudes than are immediacy or intensity.

Does a duck have antlers? Some pragmatics of “transparent questions”

This study tested experimentally certain pragmatic consequences of questions like “Is the Pope Catholic” and “Is the Pope Presbyterian.” Results indicate that such questions are interpreted transparently, so that the answer to the original question asked is taken to be the same as the obvious answer to the existentially unrelated question. Variations in the syntactic/semantic form of such questions and in the situation producing them also had consequences, specifically for judgments of the interpersonal attitude and interpersonal competence of the individual using such questions as responses.

A communication course for high‐powered bargainers: Development and effects

This project involves the development of a communication course for state tax enforcement officers and an experiment to test the effects of the course. It also introduces a unique content‐analytic system for describing and evaluating interactive behavior in “flexibly formulaic” situations. The course was found to significantly affect communicative behaviors of enforcement officers in desirable directions. Furthermore, the course affected the perception of the enforcement officers by others in ways compatible with the changed behavior.

The congruity principle and oral communication

This article compares the applicability of the congruity principle in a given oral communication setting with the results of two previous studies in the same area.

Deliberative speech in a forensic context: Andrew Hamilton at the Peter Zenger trial

Through an analysis of the defense at the trial of John Peter Zenger, the author attempts to define a relationship between forensic success and ability to adopt deliberative frames of reference in forensic contexts.