An article on interethnic communication by J. Martin, M. Hecht, and L. Larkey in "Communication Monographs" (1994) suggests some important issues for understanding the potential impact of culture on communication practices--researchers might examine such variations in communication in future research. "Culture" is an ambiguous and uncertain term, but for communication researchers, the emphasis would be on speech in language communities. A speech community shares a common method of using symbols to accomplish the transmission of ideas. Culture, as a variable, might produce 3 impacts on empirical results: (1) measurement differences; (2) differences in the mean of a variable; and (3) process differences. A reexamination of the results of the study reported in Martin, Hecht, and Larkey demonstrate limited but consistent and important differences between African American and European American perspectives on communication. (Contains a table of data and 54 references.) (Author/NKA)