Language use is a central feature of human social interaction, and numerous researchers have investigated the effects of social variables on language production. In contrast, there have been few social psychological investigations of language processing. The major purpose of the proposed research is to initiate a line of inquiry into some of the social psychological aspects of language processing. Seven experiments are planned to examine two related questions. First, under what conditions do people encode the wording of remarks? It is expected that when the wording conveys interpersonal information in a particular context, then wording will be encoded and later directly retrieved. The first five experiments will test this possibility by examining incidental memory for the wording of remarks in ecologically valid contexts. The possibility that the wording of remarks can affect memory for meaning will be examined also. Second, because speakers sometimes convey their meanings indirectly, there is a need to understand the processes involved in the comprehension of conveyed meanings. The proposed research will contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon by providing a conceptualization of different types of indirect requests and of the conditions under which an inference process that is sensitive to the social context will be required for comprehension. Two laboratory experiments that use multiple measures (reading time, judgment speed, and recognition memory) will be conducted to examine this issue.
| Holtgraves, T (1994) Communication in context: effects of speaker status on the comprehension of indirect requests. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 20:1205-18 |
| Holtgraves, T; Yang, J N (1992) Interpersonal underpinnings of request strategies: general principles and differences due to culture and gender. J Pers Soc Psychol 62:246-56 |
