Two studies of the effects of linguistic diversity upon judgments of communicator attributes and message effectiveness

Abstract

The authors conducted two studies on the effects of high and low linguistic diversity upon judgments of communicator attributes and message effectiveness. Generally, the first study demonstrated that low linguistic diversity negatively affects listeners' evaluative judgments. These effects were independent of medium of presentation (oral vs. written) and of perceived situational formality (high vs. low). The second study demonstrated that the effects obtained in the previous study were produced by lexical diversity; differences in syntactic diversity were not related to differences in listeners' judgments.