ABSTRACT
Investigators interested in studying speech, whether occurring in two-person conversations, the focus of our own studies, or occurring in groups of three or more persons, traditionally have focused their investigative interest on either of two facets of such speech: what the speaker says or how he says it. Investigations in a subarea of how people speak are often referred to as content-free studies, or studies of the noncontent dimensions of speech. Difficult as it might be to realize, a major hurdle to research on human speech has been a lack of agreement among investigators on how to define the basic unit or units to be studied. Because all the research that will be reviewed later depends upon the reader's understanding what we recorded as a unit of utterance, an example of a total interview is given in the appendix of this volume. The latency silence is merely a measure of the reaction time variable so well known in psychology.