Biomedical subjects

T Holtgraves

Publications and source records attributed to T Holtgraves.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

Comprehending illocutionary force.

According to speech act theory (Searle, 1969), utterances have both a propositional content and an illocutionary force (the speech act performed with the utterance). Four experiments were conducted to examine whether utterance comprehension involves speech act recognition. Participants in all experiments first read remarks that could be characterized by a particular speech act (e.g., beg). A recognition probe reaction time procedure was used in Experiments 1 and 2; participants indicated whether a probe word had literally appeared in the last remark that they had read. Participants were significantly slower at making this judgment (and made significantly more errors) when the probe represented the speech act performed with the prior remark than when it did not. A lexical decision task was used in Experiments 3 and 4, and participants were significantly faster at verifying target words representing the speech act performed with a remark, relative to control words. Overall, the results suggest that speech act recognition may be an important component of the comprehension of conversational remarks.

Adult↗

PubMed1998

Interpreting indirect replies.

A model is proposed that explains how people arrive at specific interpretations of indirect replies. The model is based on Grice's (1975) conversational logic, coupled with Goffman's (1967) insights regarding face management. The model assumes that hearers, upon recognizing that a speaker has violated the relevance maxim, will generate an inference in order to make sense of the remark; this inference will then be based on the hearer's belief about why the violation occurred. Face management is assumed to be a major motivation for violating the relevance maxim, and thus it should serve as a frame for interpreting the violation. As a result, the most likely interpretation of an indirect reply is one that would be face-threatening in the situation. The results of three experiments provided support for these propositions. Specifically, relevance violations were generally interpreted as conveying nonliteral meaning. In these situations negative information was most face-threatening, and as a result the replies were usually interpreted as conveying negative information. In addition, when face management as "a reason" for a relevance violation was eliminated or contradicted, relevance violations became much more ambiguous and difficult to comprehend.

Female↗

PubMed1997

Politeness and memory for the wording of remarks.

Three experiments were conducted to examine whether people spontaneously remember the wording used to convey politeness. In all experiments, subjects heard statements varying in politeness that had been made by either a high-status (e.g., a professor) or equal-status (e.g., another student) speaker. Subjects' incidental memory for these statements was then tested with either a recognition (Experiments 1 and 3) or a recall (Experiment 2) procedure. As expected, there was evidence of significant memory for wording that conveyed politeness, and subjects were more likely to remember forms that were incongruous with the speaker's status. There was also some evidence that subjects encoded the politeneess of a remark even when they were unable to recall the specific remark. The results demonstrate the role of the interpersonal dimension in the processing of language in context.

Adult↗

PubMed1994

Communication in context: effects of speaker status on the comprehension of indirect requests.

Four experiments were conducted to examine how a speaker's status can affect the comprehension of conventional and nonconventional indirect requests. The processing of conventional forms was not affected by the speaker's relative status, and consistent with past research (R. W. Gibbs, 1983), these forms were recognized quickly and without the hearer recognizing and then rejecting the literal meaning of the remark. In contrast, processing of nonconventional forms was affected by speaker status. When the interactants were equal in status, the comprehension of nonconventional forms was time-consuming and involved activation of the remark's literal meaning. This did not occur when the speaker was higher in status than the hearer. Results illustrate the role played by the interpersonal context in the comprehension of certain indirect requests.

Cognition↗

PubMed1992

Interpersonal underpinnings of request strategies: general principles and differences due to culture and gender.

Several hypotheses derived from P. Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory were tested with Ss from the United States and Korea. Ss imagined themselves in situations in which they were to make a request. They then indicated exactly what they would say in each situation and what their perceptions of the request size, the hearer's power, and the closeness of their relationship with the hearer were. Consistent with P. Brown and Levinson's theory, power, distance, and size contributed significantly to politeness. Significant predictor variable interactions suggested that an additive model is not appropriate. Finally, there was evidence of cultural and gender differences in the weighting of these predictor variables. These differences can partially account for cultural and gender differences in language use.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1989

Conversation memory: the effects of speaker status on memory for the assertiveness of conversation remarks.

We conducted three experiments to examine the effects of information about a speaker's status on memory for the assertiveness of his or her remarks. Subjects either read (Experiments 1 and 2) or listened to a conversation (Experiment 3) and were later tested for their memory of the target speaker's remarks with either a recognition (Experiment 1) or a recall procedure (Experiments 2 and 3). In all experiments the target speaker's ostensible status was manipulated. In Experiment 1, subjects who believed the speaker was high in status were less able later to distinguish between remarks from the conversation and assertive paraphrases of those remarks. This result was replicated in Experiment 2, but only when the status information was provided before subjects read the conversation and not when the information was provided after the conversation had been read. Experiment 2's results eliminate a reconstructive memory interpretation and suggest that information about a speaker's status affects the encoding of remarks. Experiment 3 examined this effect in a more ecologically representative context.

Assertiveness↗

PubMed1986

Language structure in social interaction: perceptions of direct and indirect speech acts and interactants who use them.

Speech acts (Searle, 1975) can be performed either directly or in various indirect ways. It is argued that the appropriateness of this choice is affected by the process of face management and the relative status of the speaker, and the choice of how to perform speech acts will encode social information. A written scenario format was used, and in Experiment 1, subjects rated direct and indirect questions and replies as a function of the status of the target interactants, and the extent to which the requested information was face threatening. Perceptions of the appropriateness of replies, but not the questions, varied as a function of face threat. The effects of status were in the predicted direction for both questions and replies, but significant only for the perceived politeness of questions. Subjects in Experiment 2 rated the scenario interactants and their relationships as a function of the use of direct and indirect replies and rated possible rejoinders to these replies. Inferences of status, liking, and closeness varied as a function of the reply type used, and indirect replies were more likely to be accepted than to be questioned when there was an obvious reason for their use (i.e., to manage face).

Female↗