Relationships Between Hesitation Phenomena, Anxiety, and Self-Control in a Normal Communication Situation

This study investigated relationships between three categories of hesitation phenomena, anxiety as measured by Welsh's Anxiety Index, and self-control as measured by Welsh's Internalization Ratio. The three categories of hesitation phenomena were ah and its variants, non-ah (stutters, repetitions, etc.), and silent pause. Since previous research had concentrated primarily upon psychiatric interviews, this study focused on a normal, interpersonal communication situation. Previous research also had not utilized Welsh's Internalization Ratio. Subjects were 15 male and 15 female undergraduate beginning speech students engaged in small-group discussion. It was hypothesized that data from these subjects, as with that from subjects in a clinical communication situation, would reveal that non-ah phenomena would be positively correlated with anxiety, but that there would be no other significant correlations among the variables. The findings confirmed the hypotheses, except that a significant r was found for the relationship between non-ah phenomena and the Internalization Ratio. The normal subjects in this study exhibited behaviour quite similar to that of the clinical subjects of previous research. As their Anxiety Indexes and Internalization Ratios increased, so did their stutters, repetitions, sentence changes, and the like.