Verbal Behaviour and Social Distance

Two studies were undertaken to investigate the relationship between social distance and the communicability of speech. In the first study, it was shown that individuals who personally know the author of a certain kind of story will understand that story better (as revealed by the Cloze procedure) than will individuals who do not personally know the author of the story. The second study used subjects who are members of a small group in which most people know each other. Social centrality in the group, as well as individual-to-individual social distances were studied. It was found that (1) those subjects who are often found in interaction with other members of the group (observed to be central) emit speech which communicates better to the rest of the group than those observed to be less central; (2) the degree of centrality indicated by subjects' reports shows a similar but non-significant relation with Cloze scores; (3) individually, subjects predict better the speech of those observed speaking to them than of the other subjects; and (4) subjects also predict better the speech of those they report as close, on one of the two self-report measures used. It was concluded that people show better communicability with people they spend time with than with others.