In a step toward creating a robust natural language understanding system which detects and avoids miscommunication, this artificial intelligence research report provides a taxonomy of miscommunication problems that arise in expert-apprentice dialogues (including misunderstandings, wrong communication, and bad analogies), and proposes a flexible…

This document contains four papers, discussing medical and sociocultural aspects of disability, presented at a national conference on the nonwhite disabled. In "Some Observations on Blacks and Physical Disability," Thornhill and Torres note the higher prevalence of physical disability among blacks and cite the example of more frequent lower…

This manual provides a comprehensive approach to problem solving; it is written in narrative style with numerous examples. The guide is organized in eight sections that cover the following topics: (1) problem-solving overview (with suggested readings and recommendations for schools); (2) a five-step model for solving problems; (3) strategies for…

Many two-year and four-year colleges are facing the task of instructing students who are underprepared. In the field of speech communication the problem is compounded because some students are not only academically deficient but are also communicatively apprehensive. Several courses of action must be taken to help lessen the problem. Eighty-six…

In order to identify causes of spousal abuse, current research efforts have attempted to reconstruct the communicative components of physically aggressive encounters within the family. An interactionist model of intrafamily violence, proposed by D. A. Infante, suggests that the interaction of personal, situational, and societal conditions may lead…

A study looked at an agricultural extension project in south India to examine comprehension of the extension team's intentionality by the poorest farmers. Subjects, 50 farmers in the village of Porandla in the state of Andhra Pradesh, were interviewed and measured to see if their knowledge and comprehension approximated a constant across all…

A pilot study of discourse in a practicum reading class for instruction in English as a second language examines miscommunication between non-native English speakers. Teachers and their students read transcripts of episodes from classroom discussions and wrote line-by-line analyses of what they understood was being said. Similarities and…

A significant need exists for new and expanded training programs for people who must interact with different cultures. When people experience a new cultural environment, they are likely to experience conflict between their own cultural predispositions and the values, beliefs, and opinions of the host culture. A training program, the Cultural…

Few sex education materials especially designed for the deaf population are available, and modification of existing materials and media is necessary. The average deaf person cannot easily gain information from books, magazines, or newspapers, for the majority of deaf students read at a level below others of comparable ages. This communication and…

Applying for public assistance can be a difficult, long, and humiliating process. Administrative practices can prevent applicants from receiving their lawful benefits from agencies handling Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). To examine these problems, Project Fair Play recruited graduate social work and law students as advocates for…

"Across Ages: Entering the 80's--the Quality of Life," was the theme of a week-long multidisciplinary, intergenerational (ages 14 to 92) model program sponsored by Temple University's Institute on Aging, and held on its suburban Ambler (Pennsylvania) campus in the summer of 1980. Aimed at devising methods of stimulating dialogue and…

It is hypothesized that a "cultural communication" theory is more useful and veridical for explaining ethnically related educational and social inequity than are either "ascriptive" or "deficit" theories. The study site was a successfully desegregated, urban elementary school. A fifth-grade classroom was selected for the intensive observations of…

A study investigated listening and oral communication apprehension in high school and college students from the United States and Australia. The subjects were 355 students from the United States (133 high school females, 109 high school males, 65 college females, and 46 college males), and 339 students from Australia (73 high school females, 91…

The major findings and generalizations of nine separate experiments summarized in this report have come out of a program of research on human factors in telecommunications and teleconferencing systems at Johns Hopkins University. These findings, already published in greater detail in the open literature, relate to (1) how people naturally…

A study of communication patterns in a desegregated school, located in an urban middle class black neighborhood, revealed "meddlin" (verbal and nonverbal aggression) to be a key area of cultural dissonance. This pattern is more common among blacks. Name calling, rumor mongering, body bluster, verbal intimidation, taking or destroying…