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The production and understanding of utterances in dyadic communication
Author(s) -
BRENNER STENOLOF,
HJELMQUIST ERLAND
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1978.tb00312.x
Subject(s) - utterance , psychology , cognition , cognitive psychology , competence (human resources) , linguistic competence , linguistics , social psychology , philosophy , neuroscience
Verbal communication in four dyads was analyzed with respect to syntactic form and cognitive and affective functions. Quantitative and qualitative methods were proposed to study these aspects of language behaviour. Utterances which conveyed a negative affective evaluation tended to be syntactically and cognitively complex. The cognitive and affective functions of a speaker's utterance tended to influence the syntactic quality of the listener's following utterance more than what the listener said in his own previous utterance. An investigation of the relationships between the personality characteristics flexibility, intelligence and verbal competence, and language variables suggested that flexible subjects often used utterances which expressed a positive evaluation. Furthermore, flexible subjects tended to influence the listener more by what they said than intelligent and verbally competent subjects did. It was concluded that this kind of functional analysis of language should be more adequate for psychological inquiry than in particular that of the transformational generative theory of language.