William A. Villaume

Interaction involvement and discourse strategies: The patterned use of cohesive devices in conversation

Communicative competence entails the ability of speakers to mesh their utterances to form coherent conversation. The research reported here explored the relationship between interaction involvement as a traitlike dimension of communicative competence and the use of grammatical cohesive devices to create explicit ties within conversation. It was hypothesized that three dyad types exhibiting differing patterns of interaction involvement would be differentiated by the patterns of cohesive devices used to create ties within their conversation. Results indicated that the dyads differed significantly in the patterned use of interactive ellipsis and noninteractive reference within T‐units. These patterns were seen as indicators of discourse strategies differing in their relative reliance on minimal passing moves versus more elaborate responses. Finally, it was argued that these discourse strategies are responsive to the relative certainty/uncertainty of the dyads in tracking the flow of conversation and in deter...

Aspects of Receiving Information: The Relationship between Listening Preferences, Communication Apprehension, Receiver Apprehension, and Communicator Style

Abstract This study investigated connections between listening preferences and patterns of communicator style and apprehension. An initial discriminant analysis was conducted to test whether six categories of listening styles are systematically discriminated by communicator style, communication apprehension, and receiver apprehension. There was one significant discriminant function, whose interpretation was somewhat questionable. Subsequently, a canonical correlation was conducted to test if four interval level listening preferences are systematically related to communicator style, communication apprehension, and receiver apprehension. The results were highly significant and identified three patterns of association between the set of listening preferences and the set of communicator style and apprehension variables. 1. High people-orientation in listening is systematically associated with lower receiver apprehension and dyadic communication apprehension and with a more relationally oriented communication style that attends to and affirms the other person. 2. The combination of high content- and action-orientations is associated with a precise and attentive style of arguing the issues that leaves a strong impression on other people. 3. The configuration of high time- and action-orientations along with a lack of content-orientation is associated with higher receiver apprehension but lower dyadic communication apprehension, and also with a dramatic, animated and forceful style that asserts ones goals/concerns and tends to dominate the other person.

Discovering the Listener Within Us: The Impact of Trait-Like Personality Variables and Communicator Styles on Preferences for Listening Style

Extending past research, the present study provides an initial examination of the relationship between trait-like personality variables, communicator style, and individual listening preferences. A series of canonical correlations were run to ascertain to what degree certain communication preferences and trait-like personality variables are related to preferences for receiving information. Results indicated a similar pattern of listening styles is found regardless of the variables under question adding validity to the newly formed scoring method for the LSP. Specifically, people-orientation was advocated by a more competent, caring individual who enjoys conversation and is able to juggle affection with accomplishing conversational goals. The combination of high content- and action-orientations in listening is associated with a more masculine personality and greater tendency to engage in active, precise, and impression leaving arguments. High time and action (and to a lesser extent people) orientations correlates with high neuroticism and a high motive for control. Finally, individuals reporting time- and content-orientations also report high psychoticism and prefer a friendlier, more open communication style.

An initial investigation of aging, aligning actions and presbycusis

This study investigated whether presbycusis, the decline in hearing and listening abilities associated with aging, is related to different strategies of managing participation in conversation. Transcribed conversations from four age groups of speakers, namely, young, middle aged, young elderly and old elderly, were coded for the use of various types of aligning actions. Results indicated that a decline in peripheral speech discrimination is linearly associated with decreased usage of confirmations/backchannels. The overall multivariate pattern of three aligning actions was curvilinearly predicted by age. Speakers increase their use of aligning actions in middle age and then after 60 years of age start progressively decreasing their use of aligning actions into old age. The elderly age groups exhibited less variability in their speech discrimination and listening scores than the younger age groups, but were more variable in their use of different aligning actions.

Men and Women Holding Hands Revisited: Effects of Mutual Engagement and Hand Dominance on Attributions of Cross-Sex Handholding

In line with the social meaning orientation to nonverbal behavior, the current study conceptualized handholding as a multidimensional nonverbal cue with the potential to signal relational meaning to outside observers. Results support the hypotheses that individuals attribute varied levels of intimacy to a cross-sex couple based on the mutual engagement of handholding type and the distance between elbows. In addition, the results corroborate observational studies claiming that hand dominance serves to signal relational power distribution. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for our knowledge of handholding as a form of nonverbal communication as well as their implications for the broader theoretical question of how relational meaning is signaled by nonverbal behavior.

The Multidimensionality of Presbycusis: Hearing Losses on the Content and Relational Dimensions of Speech

Abstract Presbycusis, the age associated decline in hearing and listening, has been traditionally conceptualized as the progressive inability to distinguish phonemes and hence to apprehend the content of spoken communication. Based on the distinction between the content and relational dimensions of communication, this study posed the possibility that presbycusis also involves a loss of listening ability along the relational dimension of communication. Using five measures of speech discrimination and listening, the study confirmed that aging is significantly associated with losses on the content and relational dimensions of listening. Furthermore, there are different rates of aging for these two dimensions. Whereas the loss on the content dimension is linearly related to age, the loss on the relational dimension is curvilinearly related to age with little decline in ability until a relatively drastic loss occurs in the early to mid-70s. These results indicate that the communicative impact of presbycusis is...

Interaction Involvement and the use of Referential and Formal Anaphora in Conversation

This study examined whether there are different cognitive burdens associated with the use of referential and formal anaphora in conversation, and whether these differences are systematically exploited by speakers seeking to converse coherently. It was assumed that speakers encountering difficulty in managing the pragmatics of conversation should rely more on the formal anaphoric devices of ellipsis and substitution and less on reference devices to create cohesive ties in their talk. The transcripts of 60 conversations among high-involved and low-involved speakers were coded and analyzed for the use of anaphora. Results indicated that the conversational partners of high-involved speakers used a significantly different pattern of reference and formal cohesive devices than did the conversational partners of low-involved speakers. in addition, this effect was especially pronounced for a low-involved conversational partner. Thus, a pattern of increased use of referential devices and decreased use of formal anaphora was shown to be sensitive to social situational factors that facilitate the pragmatic processing of conversation.