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.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 22, 2006 10:11 AM