Non-native speech can cause perceptual difficulty for the native listener, but experience can moderate this difficulty. This study explored the perceptual benefits of brief exposure to non-native speech. A cross-modal word matching paradigm was used to investigate perception of foreign-accented speech by native English listeners during the first moments of exposure. In 5 experiments, processing speed was tracked by measuring reaction times to visual probe words following English sentences produced by non-native speakers. In Experiment 1, RTs decreased significantly over the course of 16 Spanish-accented utterances and by the end were equal to RTs to a native voice. Control groups in Experiments 1 and 2 who heard a native voice for the first 12 trials were significantly slower than the experimental groups in the final 4 trials, ruling out practice and general strategy explanations for the rapid adaptation. The adaptation effect was replicated with a Chinese-accented voice in Experiment 3. Surprisingly, the control groups also adapted to the accented voice when they heard it at the end of the experiment. Post hoc analyses showed the difference between the control and experimental groups' means was large for the first 2 accented sentences, but attenuated as more sentence trials were included in the means, suggesting adaptation can occur within 2 to 4 sentence-length utterances. In Experiment 4, adaptation to one Spanish-accented voice improved perception of a new Spanish-accented voice, indicating that abstract properties of accented speech are learned during adaptation. In Experiment 5, adaptation to a Spanish-accented voice was as large whether the utterances consisted of English words or mostly legal nonwords. This finding suggested that some characteristics of accented speech can be learned without feedback from lexical knowledge. Overall, the results emphasize the flexibility of the human speech processing system and the need for a mechanism to explain this adaptation in models of spoken word recognition.

This investigation tests whether a stage-type model of the processing of indirect speech acts is a fully explanatory model. A stage model, like the Standard Pragmatic Model (SPM), proposes that listeners understand the meaning of an indirect speech act by first determining direct meaning and then checking this meaning against context for sufficiency. It is only when direct meaning is found not to fully capture context that a listener proceeds to understand the meaning of an indirect speech act. This sort of model has been heavily criticized in the extant theoretical and empirical research, though this investigation shows much of this criticism to be faulty and/or irrelevant to indirect speech act processing. Here, minor revision of the SPM is proposed through the introduction of Cdirect and C indirect meanings that makes the modified SPM sensitive to issues of conventionality. Two experiments test this modified model (the MSPM). Results of the first experiment showed that the MSPM is the most explanatory model in explaining the processing of non-conventional indirect speech acts. The second experiment was designed to replicate an earlier experiment by Shapiro and Murphy (1993) and to investigate the influence of conventionality on the processing of indirect speech acts. The results of the conventionality analysis allow no clear conclusions about how conventional indirect speech acts are processed, but do call the results of the Shapiro and Murphy (1993) investigation into question. Additionally, some indirect proof is found that shows that conventionality influences the processing of indirect speech acts by making judgments of direct meaning difficult when conventional cues are present. Implications of these results are discussed and overall, the MSPM is found to be the best model for describing indirect speech act processing.

This dissertation investigates pragmatic strategies and power relations related to disagreement in Mandarin Chinese using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, in which both statistic analyses of data from DCT and discourse analyses of data from ethnographic approach were conducted. The data were collected in the People's Republic of China at six universities in the north and the south of the nation as well as at a big conference. The total subjects for the DCT were 360, and the natural data were obtained from (1) surveys and interviews with a total of 45 participants, (2) 49 odd hours of recordings, and 86 valid oral discourses, both long and short. This study explores and answers three general questions. The first question is whether power relations in Chinese university settings influence pragmatic strategies in disagreement. A null hypothesis is rejected with statistic evidence. Further exploration of the ways in which the strategies are significantly different shows that the students use lower power-level strategies when disagreeing with the professors and administrators than vice versa. The students are addressed with highest level of all. However, the professors and administrators use more polite strategies to the students than the students to them. The statistic data also show no significant effect on the strategies by the two variables: gender and area. The second question asks what the pragmatic strategies in disagreement reflect regarding Chinese cultural dynamics in the higher education of contemporary China. The findings support the author's presumption that Confucianism may not still be the "guiding principle" of the norms and values in the university settings of modern China. A new cultural orientation of Chinese people is characterized with new features. The third probe of the question how the concept of relevance in Grice's CP dominates the analysis of communicative interactions involving power obtains an outcome in consistent with Kitis' "Global Relevance" as a Supermaxim of CP. Through Chinese discourse analyses, this study proves that the Maxim of Relevance of CP explicates conversational cooperation with the connection of the frame of discourse type and the social structure involving power, and the intention and comprehension of the implicature in conversations.

This study examines the logic of extreme contemporary North American environmental rhetoric from the perspective of a normative pragmatic approach to argumentation. As such, explicit normative standards for reasonable deliberative discourse serve as the epistemic grounds for a critical evaluation of a type of argumentation that is frequently relied upon by key members of extremely competitive interest groups during actual contemporary environmental policy disputes. The analysis reveals that the inferential framework and interpretive assumptions inherent in radical environmental arguments are embedded in specifiable tapestries of symbolic communication that are without grounds in absolute truth. Nonetheless, these predominantly narrative tapestries address what many people believe to be their proper role and place in the universe and are frequently implicated in chains of social and cognitive consequences that have significant bearing on American environmental policy deliberation and decision making processes. In this respect, it is argued that radical environmental argumentation is not fundamentally different than mainstream environmental argumentation. It is also argued that radical environmental arguments are as deserving of policy makers' time and consideration as any environmental argument, especially during environmental policy deliberation and decision making processes.

The main purpose of this study was to examine the role of specific social cognitive skills in psychosocial and relational adjustment to a chronic illness. The particular chronic illness investigated in this study was female breast cancer, and 30 married heterosexual couples facing the onset and treatment of breast cancer volunteered to be participants. The study was founded on the premise that chronic illness often presents as much of a social and relational challenge as it does a physical challenge. Based on this premise, the study's central argument was that persons equipped with relatively more sophisticated interpersonal communication skills would receive higher ratings of their communication functioning by their partners, express higher levels of marital satisfaction, and (in the case of wives) exhibit better psychosocial adjustment than would persons with less sophisticated communication skills. A significant association was revealed between participants' construct differentiation and message design logic. Contrary to predictions, no relationship was found between participants' social cognitive skills and partners' ratings of participants' communication functioning, or between participants' social cognitive skills and partners' assessments of global relationship satisfaction. A positive trend for wives and a significant positive association for husbands were found for the predicted relationship between participants' assessments of their partners' communication functioning and their own global relationship satisfaction. Partial support was provided for the predicted associations between wives' social cognitive skills and their own psychosocial adjustment to breast cancer, and between wives' social cognitive skills and their assessments of partners' communication functioning. Additional analyses revealed that wives' global relationship satisfaction was significantly associated with time since diagnosis and disease stage, whereas husbands' global relationship satisfaction was significantly associated with time since diagnosis only. Supplemental analyses also indicated several hypothesis-disconfirming negative associations between participants' social cognitive skills and participants' assessments of partners' communication functioning, global relationship satisfaction, and wives' psychosocial adjustment to breast cancer. These associations were found, however, only for couples wherein partners had highly discrepant construct differentiation scores. Despite providing only mixed support for the study's central argument, the study's results present several interesting findings that warrant further investigation. Intervention implications are also identified.

From my previous community work, I had a sense that recognizing the pattern of how and why public stories emerge in public dialogue was an important part of understanding and strengthening a democratic public culture. I studied the public dialogue of the University of Arizona Faculty Senate in part because I belong to this community. I observed six public meetings of the faculty senate, developed field notes, analytical memos, listened to and transcribed the audiotapes of the faculty meetings, and analyzed the sixteen public stories from those meetings. I developed a new research methodology for understanding public stories in public dialogue which uses combined perspectives of ethnographic, conversational and narrative analysis. I analyzed the research through the lens and audiophone of a critical ethnographer in order to see and hear the public stories in public dialogue and understand the faculty senate's democratic public culture. The results of my research show that the UA faculty senate's public speech is partially demonstrated by public speech which includes public stories in public dialogue. The results show that the democratic public culture of the UA faculty senate is functional, fragile and fragmented. This juxtaposition of characteristics is, to some degree, mediated by public stories which develop as trigger stories. Trigger stories are produced when one of Grice's conversational maxims--functioning as norms of interaction--quality or quantity is violated. In this research, other norms of interpretation, specifically, equality as moral power or relationship building do not generate trigger stories. This research is important for understanding and strengthening the public speech of the UA faculty senate and its democratic public culture. Also, the method of story and dialogue analysis developed in this research can be applied to other democratic public cultures.

Drawing from research in involvement, message incongruency, schema theory and associative memory models, hypotheses were developed predicting that message incongruency will have differential effects on information processing within levels of high (HI) and low (LI) involvement subjects. It is argued that various characteristics of an executional cue may not affect HI and LI consumers in traditional ways prescribed by peripheral- versus central-route processes. Rather, the presence of incongruencies between the visual and verbal elements within a print ad may have a greater attractive force and motivate more thorough elaboration of pictorial and copy information than congruent elements. Although support for hypotheses was limited, cell means were remarkably consistent in the predicted directions and proportions, especially for recall of copy information and recall of the primary picture object. These patterns provide some support that the two dimensions of incongruency, relevancy and expectancy, do play a role in information processing for both high-and low-involvement consumers.

For more than forty years, communication and political science researchers have examined how receivers evaluate sources. Valuable attention to source credibility in the communication literature has yielded numerous categorizations of the dimensions receivers use to evaluate sources. Little recent work in communication, however, has focused on source evaluations, and much of the previous work has been criticized for not recognizing the context-specific nature of source credibility. Important work in political science has focused on receiver evaluations of political officials. This literature, however, has not produced consistent results as to the importance of individual trait types in the evaluation of presidential candidates. Most of this work did not examine determinants of trait use in the evaluation of presidential candidates, including receiver demographics, media use, and political disaffection. Neither communication nor political science researchers have adequately recognized the commonalities which exist in their separate examinations of source evaluations. The current study draws upon communication and political science research to examine respondents' use of candidate traits in a specific and important context, the evaluation of presidential candidates. The study explores the importance of competence, character, empathy, and leadership traits in evaluations of presidential candidates during a time of increasingly negative media coverage of presidential candidates and high levels of political disaffection among citizens. Another important contribution of the study to the literature on trait evaluations is its examination of determinants of trait use in evaluations of presidential candidates. The 1996 American National Election Studies pre- and post-election interviews were used to answer the questions posed in the study. Results suggest that empathy and leadership were more important than character or competence in respondents' evaluations of Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Ross Perot in 1996. Economic conditions and party identification were also strong predictors of the vote in 1996. The results provide strong evidence that empathy and leadership were more important in 1996 than in presidential elections of the last three decades. The study suggests important sex differences in trait use, as well as significant relationships between media use, political knowledge, and political disaffection and use of traits to evaluate candidates.

The purpose of this dissertation is to give a constructivist account of conflict message production in romantic relationships. Two main claims are advanced. First, the degree to which partners confirm each other's identity in conflict situations results from their definition of the situation. Second, those with more sophisticated systems for construing others have more integrated and more usable situational definitions. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis reveled main effects for cognitive complexity and perceived resistance in predicting the level of identity confirmation in complaint messages. Interactions between cognitive complexity and perceived resistance, perceived dominance, perceived severity, and attributional tendency were also significantly associated with complaint message quality. Consistent with the claim that more sophisticated social cognitions have more integrated situational definitions, those with higher levels of social cognitive development were influenced by their perception of their power in the relationship, the severity of the partner's transgression, and the degree to which they tend to attribute a partner's dissatisfying behaviors to negative intentions, while only the perception of resistance predicted the identity confirming quality of the less cognitively complex participants' messages.

Indignation is a discrete social emotion specifying disapproval of a blameworthy action explicitly perceived as violating the objective order, and implicitly perceived as injurious to the self-concept. Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of defensive attributions and implicit theories of moral character on indignation. Both studies attempted to influence the defensive attribution process by manipulating apparent similarity between participants and an imagined offender while exploring the relationship between people's implicit theories about moral character (ITM) and measures indicative of indignation. Two implicit attribution theory perspectives were examined: Entity theorists believe that personal moral attributes are fixed and unchanging, while incremental theorists believe that personal moral attributes are malleable. Entity theorists, who tend to base their attributions on internal characterological dispositional information, were hypothesized to show greater indignation after offensive episodes than incremental theorists, who prefer to use more external situation-relevant information in forming their attributions. Subjects in the similar conditions were expected to form more defensive attributions than those in the dissimilar conditions, thus a second hypothesis predicted that those in the similar conditions would show greater indignation after offensive episodes than those in the dissimilar conditions. Study 1 used a computer program to manipulate certain aspects of similarity while designating subjects as either entity or incremental theorists based on their responses to three ITM scale measures. It revealed a positive correlation between the presence of an entity theory and the experience of indignation. Study 2, using a cognitive response set induction to operationalize similarity while experimentally manipulating ITM, provides evidence for a causal relationship between ITM and indignation. As predicted, entity theorists in both studies responded with significantly higher levels of indignation after offensive episodes than did incremental theorists. Only modest support was found for an hypothesized relationship involving defensive attribution and indignation.