Summaries: the best scientific articles for communication and marketing summarized

Article summary with: The effect of linguistic abstraction on interpersonal distance van Reitsma - van Rooijen et. al (2007)

When we talk to people, we often make inferences about what we think of them (like, dislike, good, awkward), even though we don’t say it out loud. It’s not always clear why we feel close or distant towards another person. The authors of this article think that very subtle language messages may cause these feelings of closeness or distance. For example: people usually don’t use any form of prejudice directly towards a person. If prejudice plays a role in a conversation, the signs are way more subtle. Still, these signs can influence feelings of distance.

The same goes for the description of behaviour from in-group and out-group. Postive in-group behaviour and negative out-group behaviour are

Summary with the article: Perceptual attributes of voice: development and use of rating scales van Gelfer (1988)

Voice judgements of a listener are not easy. In a study that compared different studies on voice description terms, only 2 of the 27 terms on total, ‘horse’ and ‘nasal’, were used in all of the studies. Defining a normal voice is especially hard, and researchers busy with this definition almost never pay attention to listeners judgements.

There are a few scales available for measuring “normal” voices. These are:

• System by Darley, Aronson and Brown
  Sophisticated but hardly used for nonpathological speakers.

• F.B. Wilson Voice Profile
  Used by clinicians and also quite reliable, but same problem as mentioned earlier: hardly used for nonpathological speakers

Introduction

de Groot, de Haan, and van Dijken (2023) explore how young people navigate the algorithmic filtering of their social media experiences. They investigate their awareness and control of these algorithms, highlighting the implications for learning and media literacy in a digitally dominated world.

Methodology

The study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining two phases:

1. Focus group discussions: Involving 28 young people (16-25 years old) across diverse backgrounds to explore their understanding and experiences with social media algorithms.
2. Individual interviews: Conducted with 6 participants from the focus groups to delve deeper into their perceptions and strategies for navigating algorithmic filtering.

Summary with the article: The communicative functions of paralanguage and prosody van Street (1990).

Sometimes people don’t listen to what you say, but to how you say it. The acoustic elements in speech help listeners to interpret the speakers characteristics and intentions. Non-verbal speech is usually called prosody and paralanguage and has been widely studied in psychology, linguistics and communication sciences. There are four paradigms were studies of non-verbal speech stem from. The first one is that interest in physiology of sound production. This means that researchers study the interrelationships between muscle systems, facial characteristics and the volume. The second one is the study of language attitudes. Researchers have studied correlates of speech styles. An example of this is to see how people evaluate different speck accents. The third paradigm is the study of personal characteristics in vocal behavior. Researchers have found that extraverts pause less than introverts. The

Summary with the article: Communication accommodation theory van Shepard et. al. (2001)

The study of language has been studies across different disciplines, such as social psychology, sociolinguistics, sociology and communication. The communication accommodation theory (CAT) is an important theoretical perspective for these four areas of research. The CAT is an interdisciplinary model of relational processes in communicative interaction. This theory contains different context and behaviors of verbal and non-verbal varieties and attitudes and perceptions. The theory was originally developed as a sociopsychological model to explain modifications in speech style during interactions and was called the speech accommodation theory (SAT). SAT proposed that social cognitive processes mediate the relationship of communicative behavior and interaction and that individual motivations was the driving force behind