November 22, 2006

Mehrabianian matters


KQED radio's "Forum" show continues to offer interviews on language-related subjects.  As reported here yesterday, on Monday it was Kitty Burns Florey on sentence diagramming.  Yesterday it was Anne Karpf talking about her recently published book The Human Voice.  Along the way she savaged the literature on the relative contributions of words, voice, and body language to communication -- both the original Mehrabian research and the "7 - 38 - 55" version that spread into folk knowledge (recently discussed here) -- and disputed claims that women talk a lot more than men (a topic that Mark Liberman has been returning to on Language Log again and again after his first postings on the subject this summer).  I haven't seen her book yet, but she sounds generally level-headed.  Meanwhile, you can listen to the Florey and Karpf interviews via the "Forum" homepage.

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Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 22, 2006 10:11 AM