Communicating information in conversations: a cross-cultural comparison

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this study was to compare the amount of information sent by the speaker, received and retrieved by the listener in inter-and intra-cultural conversations. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) in their conversations, inter-cultural interactants would communicate signi®cantly less information than intra-cultural interactants with other variables held constant, (2) the two inter-cultural conditions would not be dierent from each other in terms of the amount of information communicated, and the same would be true with the two intra-cultural conditions, and (3) in their conversations, the speakers in inter-cultural conditions would send the same amount of information as speakers in intracultural conditions given that all speakers would pass a test on the materials they were going to present. Participants were 40 Canadian and 40 Chinese university students, and they were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions. Each dyad engaged in two medical conversations, which were videotaped upon the consent of the participants. The nature of the conversations resembled physician-patient face-to-face interactions. Results from written tests immediately following the conversations provided strong support for Hypothesis 1 and 2, and results from viewing the videotapes provided partial support for Hypothesis 3. In relation to the amount of information sent by the speakers, listeners in inter-and intra-cultural conditions retrieved only 50% and 75% of the information respectively. Based on the ®ndings, one may argue that inter-cultural communication differs signi®cantly from intra-cultural communication in the amount of information Int. J. Intercultural Rel. Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 387±409, 1999 # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0147-1767/99 $ -see front matter PII: S0147-1767(99)00003-6 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijintrel *The author would like to thank Dr Ronald Hoppe for helpful comments on the manuscript and for support in completing this study; Dr Janet Bavelas, for crucial guidance in designing and conducting the experiment; Dr Michael Bond for enlightening suggestions on the design of the experiment; Drs Lorne Rosenblood, Bruno Zumbo, Peter MacMillan, Cindy Hardy, and Pat Konkin, and Trudy Johnson, for statistical consulting and helpful comments on the manuscript; and all the participants, for their time and eorts in making this study possible.Finally, the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments. *University of Northern British Columbia, Department of Psychology, 3333 University Way, Prince George, B.C. Canada V2N 4Z9, Canada. Tel.: +250-960-6502; Fax: +250-960-5536.; E-mail: lih@unbc.ca This research is based in part on the author's doctoral thesis presented to the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 45th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico, May 25±29, 1995. 387 communicated in situat...

Backchannel Responses as Misleading Feedback in Intercultural Discourse

“…Univariate F-test showed that no two groups were significantly different from each other, Table 1, the four groups had similar speaker presentation scores but very different listener recall scores. Detailed analyses of speaker presentation and listener recall scores are presented elsewhere (Li, 1999a). All dyads were same-gender; males and female were evenly distributed in all conditions.…”

“…The smallest string of words with meaning was the unit of analysis (Bales, 1950;Li, 1999a;Roter & Hall, 1992). Each unit of information was worth 4 points.…”

Knowledge transfer in the companies of the Basque Country Autonomous Community: absorption capability and spaces for knowledge interaction

“…El tipo de conocimiento que predomina en las comunidades epistémicas es relativamente esotérico y formalizado (codificado), por lo que para pertenecer a dicha comunidad es preciso compartir las bases nucleares del conocimiento que se produce en su interior. Nuevamente, sin un sistema común de comunicación, la transferencia de conocimiento (y con ello la futura creación de ideas) es un proceso limitado o inexistente ya que los miembros recibirán mensajes sin entenderlos (Li, 1999). En la medida en que el conocimiento que predomina en las comunidades epistémicas es explicito (codificado) la cercanía física de sus miembros es menos relevante y es más frecuente encontrar que las comunidades epistémicas tiene un carácter global (Coe y Bunnell, 2003;Ponds et al, 2007;Hussler y Rondé, 2007).…”

Grounding in intercultural communication.

“…Clarity and precision in the information delivered provide the basis for accurate and accessible information retrieval. Studies on information transmission and recollection have shown that in intercultural exchanges listeners can typically retrieve only 50% of the information delivered by the speaker or 25% less than the information retrieved in intracultural exchanges (Li, 1999a).…”

“…Nevertheless, to initiate the repairing sequences in intercultural encounters, the nonnative listener requires being quite aware of the possibilities of miscommunication in intercultural communication (Erickson, 1975;Gass & Varonis, 1991;Gumperz, 1978;Li, 1999a;Tannen, 1981). Studies of repairing conversational errors have found that native speakers usually take the role of repairing or correcting inaccuracies in the information.…”