The "Competent Communicator" as a Cognitive Prototype

Abstract

Past theories concerned with communicative competence have assumed that perceiver's evaluations of the competence of a communicative performance are based on a conception of the "ideal communicator. " Psychological theoty on categorization implies that this assumption is most viable if conceptions of 'prototypes" relevant to competence in general ("the communicatively competent person") are rich in defining characteristics relative to their logical superordinate ("the skilled person"), yet distinct from other skill-related prototypes (such as "the artistically talented person"), and if conceptions of prototypes relevant to competence in specific interactive situations are also relatively rich in defining characteristics, but similar to one another. Analysis of freely elicited lists of characteristics for categories within a taxonomic hierarchy for skill support rhese implications, showing that people's conceptions of 'kommunicative competence" are organized in the manner most conducive to their use as the basis for competence evaluation. Results also point out the critical role played by concrete, rather than abstract, characteristics in differentiating among general and situation-specific prototypes.Among the studies that communication scholars have performed within the area of social competence, those that have become most influential have conceived of competence from the viewpoint of the perceiver. As Harris (1979) noted, the nowclassic study by Wiemann (1977) was in essence an attempt to establish the dimensional structure used by perceivers in their evaluation of interactor skill. Norton's (1978) work on communicator style had the same implicit intent, and Charles Puvirt (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) resides at 1629 Columbia Road, #425, Washington, DC 20009. Lorry Huighr (M.A., Arizona State University) is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Communication and Theater, University of Illinois-Chicago.

Systematic variation in organizationally-shared cognitive prototypes of effective leadership based on organizational form

“…While several approaches to the measurement of the content of cognitive prototypes have been developed over the years [including reaction time measures when items are presented on a computer screen (e.g., Lord et al, 1984, study 1), content analysis of freely generated lists of descriptive adjectives (e.g., Pavitt & Haight, 1985), and evaluation of statements regarding the perceived similarity of photographs (e.g., Yarmey & Johnson, 1982)], cognitive prototype is most commonly operationally defined in terms of people's judgments about how well various attributes fit with categories (Lord et al, 1984;Rosch, 1978;Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Thus, questionnaire measures are frequently employed in the measurement of prototypicality, with the extent to which an item is endorsed on a carefully-constructed Likert scale being interpreted as the extent to which that item fits the prototype of the respondent.…”

The Interactive Media Package for Assessment of Communication and Critical Thinking (IMPACCT©): Testing a Programmatic Online Communication Competence Assessment System

“…Might peers who are more engaged with the student's educational experience be more correspondent (Waldron & Yungbluth, 2007)? The cognitive schematic configuring of what constitutes competence may remain relatively stable over time (Canary & MacGregor, 2008;Pavitt, 1989Pavitt, , 1990Pavitt & Haight, 1985), yet the association of these concepts may be relatively fluid in the transition to the first semester of university experience. Are the cohort developmental effects of the college, and especially the freshman, experience in general, separable from the influences of exposure to the communication course specifically?…”

“Oh, what tangled webs we weave”;: Concerns about current conceptions of communication competence

“…By implication, this work would contribute to mapping the repertoire of behaviors from which an actor would draw in order to communicate competently with a given person in a given situation. Pavitt and Haight (1985) suggest, however, that the behavioral repertoire map may be impossible to develop. These authors showed that elicited characteristics of competence would differ more across contextfree conceptions of specific skills than across context-specific conceptions under any one skill.…”