A self-report instrument (PVB). designed to measure Predispositions toward Verbal Behavior, was found to have acceptable internal reliability, content validity, moderate construct validity, and strong criterion-related validity. Subjects were found to have a generalized cognitive orientation toward their speech patterning that correlated positively with number of words and duration of talk in both highly-structured interviews and unstructured discussion situations.Research on the formal, noncontent properties of verbal interaction lacks coherent history, despite a tradition extending back through more than three decades of inquiry. Early accounts of why people tend to speak at characteristic levels erred in reducing the issue to the constraints of personality traitsdxtraversion, dominance, rigidity, and the like. More recent explanations err in the opposite direction by appealing to equally narrow grounds of social contingency. Notions based on "personality" and "trait" are undermined by evidence that people tend to accommodate their speaking styles to the patterns manifested by other interactants; as behavior moves from impression formation to steady state, it tends to become more synchronous in frequency, duration, rate, and reaction time. On the other hand, the logic of situationally based explanation ignores evidence of the limits to accommodation and the fact that the more global features of speech tend to be consistent from one class of social situations to another. E.D. Chapple was among the first to report data on the stability of individual differences in the temporal ordering of speech:We all know, as a matter of observation, that people have different rates of interaction. Some of our friends or acquaintances seem to talk and act very speedily as compared to ourselves; others are slow and deliberate. These characteristics of individuals are something we intuitively recognize, and we often are at variance with the rates at which others act. For example, where there are two persons in interaction, one whose actions are quick and speech voluble, and the other, slow and given to long, well-rounded periods, we are apt to find that the speedy one keeps interrupting the slow one, jumping in when the other pauses, and so on. (Chapple & Arensberg, 1940, 31-32) Frequency and amount of speaking, Chapple later reported, was somewhat consistent over situation, task, and participants, with broad latitude of variation within a given event over time (Chapple, 1942). Goldman-Eisler also reported evidence of cross-situational consistency in speaking frequency but found even greater stability in levels of silence:A capacity for maintaining long periods of silence, or holding up action, or viewed differently, an inhibition of expression in social interaction, seems to constitute a relatively permanent feature in an individual's conversational behavior. (1951, 361) Borgatta and Bales also noted stability in rate and frequency of verbal activity but observed, more importantly, that a person's rate of interaction is a...