The studies reviewed in this paper are somewhat diverse. The one unifying feature in all of them is their purpose of identifying the ways in which non-content aspects of speech elicit personality impressions. Whether the speech variables are dialect (or sociolect) categories or personality-expressive characteristics, whether they are linguistically categorized or acoustically manipulated variables, the central interest is in identifying the "implicit personality theory" of judges in their reactions to various types of speech. THE QUANTIFIABILITY OF VOCAL VARIABLESStudies of "implicit personality theory" (Bruner and Tagiuri, 1954) and interpersonal perception have a long history in social psychology, but investigators have typically avoided using actual people as stimuli, probably because of the difficulties of quantifying the appearance and behavior of stimulus persons. It is easy enough to quantify the personality impression responses of judges by using adjective rating scales, but there are so many aspects to the appearance and observable behavior of the stimulus person that it becomes difficult to specify the cues by which the judge makes his judgments. Many investigators have avoided the problem by reading a list of adjectives to judges, pretending that the traits apply to some real person, and then asking judges to check other adjectives that they think would apply to the person. This procedure might provide useful information about which traits go together to form each judge's "implicit personality theory", but it also runs the risk of being merely a word definition game. 1 1 The same kind of information as to which traits go together in the "implicit personality theories" of persons has been gathered in the more concrete situations where actual people are rated on adjectives. The judgments are made either from acquaintance with the persons or from exposure to the vocal, visual or verbal characteristics of the person and often the ratings are factor analyzed to present the interrelations among the trait adjectives in simplified form. Numerous examples of such studies appear in this review.