ANALYZING UTTERANCES AS THE OBSERVATIONAL UNIT

If utterances are the observational unit of analysis and there are no sequential patterns to the interaction, two alternative statistical models may be applied. A hierarchical design in which utterances are nested within subjects and subjects are nested within treatment condition is considered. One method of analysis pools utterances within treatment condition; the other method collapses across utterances to obtain subject means. Inappropriate application of the pooling model instead of the subject means model can lead to Type I errors, decreased generalizability, and inflated variance estimates that attenuate univariate and multivariate correlations. The effect of utterance reliability on the apparent unidimensionality and parallelism of multiple indicators is also discussed.     

THE CONTRIBUTION OF KINESIC ILLUSTRATORS TOWARD THE COMPREHENSION OF VERBAL BEHAVIOR WITHIN UTTERANCES

The study assessed the extent to which a speaker's visible body movements can improve verbal comprehension for listeners. Subjects responded to multiple-choice items designed to test their comprehension of 12 videotaped spoken utterances which had been obtained by asking speakers to describe either objects in motion (e.g., a tennis ball, a car, spraying water) or abstract concepts. The 60 subjects each responded to stimuli in one of three presentation conditions (audiovisual, audiovisual without lip and facial cues, and audio-alone) over four signal-to-noise ratios. The results indicated that: (1) visual cues can at times significantly improve comprehension scores, even with lip and facial cues not present; (2) visual cues are increasingly useful as noise is introduced; (3) visual cues assist the comprehension of certain grammatical types of verbal segments regardless of semantic content expressed in those type segments.