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Effects of Language Use on Listeners' Attitudes
The effect a particular linguistic variation has on a speaker's perceived effectiveness and
credibility will be determined primarily by cultural perceptions of how skilled a communicator
speaks. In most Western cultures a skilled communicator is expected to speak fluently, confidently
and articulately, and perceived effective but any deviations from these standards make such
speaker incompetent. Communicators are generally seen as less effective and less credible when
they speak slowly (Miller, Maruyama, Beaber, & Valone, 1976), or when their message is low in
lexical diversity (Bradac, Davies, Courtright, Desmond, & Murdock, 1977) or filled with hedges,
filled pauses and parenthetical remarks (Erickson, Lind, Johnson, & O'Barr, 1978; Hosman, 1989).
Using inappropriately crude language also hurts the communicator's credibility (Bostrom,
Baseheart, & Rossiter, 1973; Paradise, Cohl, & Zweig, 1980). However, a recipient's expectations
regarding the communicator's speech also is affected by the communicator's social category
(Burgoon, 1990; Scherer, 1979a). When encountering a persuasive message, a recipient will try to
determine its intended meaning on the basis of all the available information, including relevant
speech norms, the message's content and the communicator's verbal and nonverbal(gestures)
behaviours (Krauss, 1987). If the speech conforms to normative expectations, the recipient may
evaluate the communicator positively and be more receptive to the persuasive message (Burgoon,
1990), but if it falls outside the acceptable normative range for a member of the speaker's category,
the receptivity will be lowered. Considering gender cultural expectation, women are typically
expected to possess less power than men, people may expect them to employ less assertive and
more indirect strategies in attempting to influence men. As a result, women who speak in an
expectancy-congruent tentative style may have greater persuasive effectiveness with men than
women who speak assertively.
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To buttress this view the researches of Carli (1990; Lakoff, 1973; Mulac & Lundell, 1982; Quina,
Wingard, & Bates, 1987) has found that women tend to speak more tentatively in persuasive
communication than men (to use more hedges, question tags and disclaimers), particularly when
they are communicating to a male audience, and female communicators are more persuasive with
a male audience when they speak tentatively than when they speak assertively. Similarly, Burgoon
and Stewart (1974) found that men who use fewer intensifiers and women who use more
intensifiers are less persuasive than those who conform to the gender norms regarding language
intensity. The recipient's own patterns of language use may also moderate the relation of the
communicator's language and persuasion. According to speech accommodation theory (Giles,
Coupland, & Coupland, 1991), similarity in language use between communicator and recipient
reduces the perceived psychological distance between communicator and recipient, and this in turn
can lead to greater receptivity to persuasive communication. Persuasive effectiveness has been
shown to be positively related to perceived communicator-recipient similarity in language intensity
(Aune & Kikuchi, 1993), lexical diversity (Bradac et al., 1977), and speech rate (Street & Brady,
1982; Street, Brady, & Putnam, 1983). However, more recent research suggests that the relation
of language and persuasion is more complicated. Although a communicator's language can
influence perceived credibility, linguistic style also can affect the comprehensibility of the
persuasive message. Communicators who speak rapidly may be judged more credible than those
who speak at a normal rate, but their rapid speech may adversely affect the clarity of their messages
(S. Smith & Shaffer, 1995). Similarly, although a communicator 's credibility may be reduced by
frequent use of intensifiers (e.g., really, very), hedges, hesitations, and tag questions, these
rhetorical devices also may enhance message clarity (M. Hamilton, Hunter, & Burgoon, 1990) and
inhibit positive and negative thoughts about the message (Gibbons, Busch, & Bradac, 1991). In
these examples, the same speech behaviour can have a positive effect on perceived speaker
credibility and negative effects on message comprehensibility or cognitive responding. As a result,
it is difficult to specify in the abstract how a given speech variable will affect attitude change in
any specific instance (e.g., Gibbons et al., 1991; Hosman, 1989; Miller & Burgoon, 1977; Woodall
& Burgoon, 1983). When effects of speech cues and message content are considered together, the
effects of speech cues on attitude change may be limited. The effects of speech cues on the
recipient's source credibility and attitude is likely to be attenuated when the message recipient has
sufficient capacity and motivation to process information relevant to the merits of the advocated
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position. Unfortunately, except for a few studies (Gibbons et al., 1991; Giles, Henwood, Coupland,
Harriman, & Coupland, 1992), the role of language variations in attitude change has not been
systematically examined within the context of process models of persuasive communication.
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