This article examines the separate and combined impact of hedges, hesitations, and intensifiers on perceptions of authoritatiwness, sociability, character, and similarity, and the extent to which messages containing one or more of these language uariables difjersfrom a "prototypically"power1ess message in eualuatiue consequences. A "prototypically" powerless message is one that contains not only hedges, hesitations, and intensifiers, but also contains polite forms and meaningless particles, such as "oh, we1l"and "you know. " Two studies indicated that hedges and hesitations individually affected perceptions of authoritativeness and sociability, but interactions among the uariables were not found in the studies. Furthermore, only high intensifiers/low hedges/low hesitations and low intensifiers/low hedges/low hesitations messages differed significantly from the "prototypically" powerless message. The second study revealed that speaker status interacted to affect eualuatiue consequences. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the power of speech style construct.

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This study examines the effects of powerful versus powerless speech styles on employment interview outcomes, extending and refining research by Wiley and Eskilson. Undergraduate and professional respondents listened to one of eight audiotaped interviews manipulated by speech style, interviewer gender, and interviewee gender and evaluated the interviewees’ dynamism, social attractiveness, competence, and employability on Likert-type scales. Results indicate that a powerful speech style results in positive attributions of competence and employability and that professional respondents evaluated the speech styles differently than did undergraduates. Implications for the employment interview are discussed, and directions for future research are also identified.

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This study investigated the impact of power-of-speech style, need for cognition, and argument quality on participants' perceptions of a speaker, cognitive responses, and attitude toward the topic. Based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion, it was hypothesized that the three independent variables would interact to affect cognitive responses and attitude toward the topic. The results did not support the hypothesis. Path analysis was also used to analyze the data. The path analysis revealed that power-ofspeech style had a small, direct effect on attitude and several, indirect effects mediated by cognitive response categories. Argument quality had a direct effect on attitude toward topic. The results are discussed in terms of their importance for the persuasive effects of power-of-speech style, with specific focus on the role of speech style in an ELM framework.For a number of years, scholars have investigated the consequences of powerful and powerless speech styles for the evaluations of speakers. Generally, this research has found that across a number of situations, a powerful speech style produces positive speaker attributions and evaluations whereas a powerless speech style results in negative speaker attributions and evaluations (e.g., Adkins & Brashers, 1995;