Robert Hopper

Speech characteristics and employability

This research explored relationships between employees’ speech characteristics within job interview situations and employers’ hiring decisions. Using semantic differential instruments, the researchers examined employer attitudes toward speech samples and relationships between these attitudes and employment decisions. Results revealed a stable three‐factor model describing employers’ perceptions of employees’ speech characteristics. This model, however, was only partially successful as a predictor of employment decisions.

Employment interviewers' reactions to Mexican American speech

Employment interviewers at large businesses in San Antonio, Texas, listened to taped speech samples of Mexican American males speaking English with varying degrees of accentedness in simulated employment interviews, evaluated speaker personality characteristics, and made a hiring prediction about whether each speaker might be hired for each of three level positions: supervisor, skilled technician, and semi‐skilled worker. Measures of interviewers’ degree of expectations (stereotypes), exposure, and language attitudes related to Mexican Americans were set in a multiple regression equation predicting hiring decisions. Results indicated that together, expectations, exposure and language attitudes did account for a significant amount of the variance for hiring predictions. The individual predictive power of each variable varied according to position. For supervisor, a measure of reactions to actual speech stimuli was the only significant individual predictor. For skilled technician, scores from each variable ...

Remediation and Legislation in Everyday Talk: How Communicators Achieve Consensus.

Communicators achieve increased rule consensus as they use talk to overcome problems. Two kinds of talk seem especially useful to increasing consensus: remedial talk, which uses rules to correct past problems; and legislative talk, which uses rules to propose guides for future conduct.

Mexican American's evaluations of spoken Spanish and English

Mexican American adults listened to samples of standard English, Spanish‐accented English, standard Spanish, and Tex‐Mex (Texas Spanish). Attitude reactions interacted significantly with the subjects ethnic self‐referent, the amount of Spanish spoken, income, level of education, and age. “Standard” dialects were generally preferred to “nonstandard” dialects in both English and Spanish.

Language attitudes in the employment interview

This research examined effects upon employment decisions of an interviewees speech characteristics, as displayed in job interviews. The hypothesis behind this study was that an applicants speech characteristics affect hiring decisions in ways which could be separated from influences due to the applicants ethnicity.

Alignment talk in the job interview

The research reported here describes aligning talk in simulated employment interviews. Alignment talk is used metacommunicatively by speakers to bracket, transform, or qualify other talk, hence it assumes great importance in how communicators define and evaluate situations. Four features of alignment talk appear both in the scholarly literature and in the speech of interview participants in our data: accounts, meta‐talk, formulations, and qualifiers. Each of these features are described in the present report, and their uses in job interviews are explored. It is concluded that these devices serve to accentuate role differences between interviewer and applicant, and to enforce rather stringent norms of how one talks in the job interview. Implications for interviewing practice are discussed.

Relationships between speech delivery and speech effectiveness

Six speech delivery variables—volume, rate, voice quality, posture, gesture, and bodily movement—were varied within a five‐minute persuasive speech. The speech was delivered in each of ten conditions by the same speaker in the same environment. The resultant video‐tapes were validated and shown to more than 220 subjects. The findings of this phase of the research indicated that speech delivery, as operationally defined in this study, had virtually no effect on attitude change, recall‐comprehension, or ethos. Further investigation using vitiated evidence in the speech indicated that in “composition ineffective” conditions, delivery contributed significantly to some measures of speech effectiveness. However, the greatest variance in most measures emerged in connection with the composition of the speech, with speech delivery being an augmenting variable in “ineffective composition” conditions.

Speech in telephone openings: Emergent interaction v. routines

Telephone openings are of theoretical interest to discourse analysts in that they occur in speech only, and begin at definite moments. The present inquiry traces a sequential model of four routine slots in telephone openings. This model is tested against tape recorded and transcribed data in naturally‐occurring telephone openings. A distinct minority of telephone openings proceed precisely as the model might predict. However, routines do provide templates against which emergent usages are marked. The essay discusses implications for the nature of interaction, the cultural universality of the sequential model, and generalizability of these findings to other speech events.

Disclaiming: A test of two competing views

Sociologists Hewitt and Stokes (1975) argue that disclaiming is a positive interactional tactic used to define forthcoming problematic actions as irrelevant to ones established identity. Several researchers interested in speech styles argue that disclaiming negatively impacts on ones identity by creating an image of powerlessness. The findings of an experiment reported here suggest that disclaimers have no effect, positive or negative, on others’ credibility attributions. This finding is inconsistent with past speech styles research. A second study supported a “hammer effect”; reinterpretation of these studies. It was only when subjects were presented with an unrealistic number of disclaimers that adverse effects for disclaiming were found.

Generic he in conversation

The use of the pronoun he in circumstances of sex‐indefinite reference unduly emphasizes men over women, thereby both re‐constituting and signifying males’ micropolitical hegemony. To date this claim has been advanced primarily on the basis of imagined examples and of examples from writing. We searched for generic he in everyday conversation and found no clear instances of it. Speakers use they as an unmarked singular generic pronoun. We did find some possibly‐generic usages of he, especially: (1) referring to an unmarked masculine role occupant (e.g., a member of Congress), and (2) referring to a non‐human (e.g., a cockroach). We situate these findings within controversies about gender‐fair references to women and men, and conclude that conversational uses of he seem more various and complex‐and perhaps more anti‐female‐than we had supposed. We caution against facile generalization to conversational interaction of arguments based in written and imagined exemplars.