experiments were designed to test for differences between spoken and written expression. These 2 modes were controlled by limiting time for preparation, time for exposition, and by limiting the Ss to 2 balanced topics. Since each S spoke and wrote on the 2 topics each was his own control. Spoken expression produces more material (words, phrases, sentences), more ideas and subordinate ideas, more ancillary ideas, communicative signals, and orientation signals. Spoken expression is more repetitious and more elaborative in all aspects of analysis. These differences between the 2 modes are related to facility of utterance both biologically and psychologically. The psychological factors include inhibition, deliberateness, memory for what is said, and a drive to prevent silent intervals.

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Spoken expression produces significantly more cognitive and linguistic material than written expression. This experiment tested whether the facility of the organ of use was, in part, responsible by examining different, and more facile writing techniques (writing, typing, stenotyping) on the same variables. As facility increases in the writing mode, cognitive and linguistic indices do approach those previously found in spoken expression, but still differ significantly from them. Speaking, although an overlaid function, is favored over any mode of writing by a smaller musculature (in the larynx) a lesser energy commitment, greater practice, and earlier (ontogenetic) use. More fundamentally, it appears to be a “natural” function biologically.

Under controlled conditions, Ss differed significantly in their reproductions of The War of the Ghosts, depending upon their mode of acquisition (listening and reading) and their mode of reproduction (speaking or writing). Listeners produced a larger corpus, more ideas, fewer omissions of important units, more distortions, and a stylistically superior reproduction than readers. Reproduction by speaking produced a larger corpus, less diversity of expression, more additions, more subordinate ideas, and more signals than did reproduction by writing. Listening seems (logically and empirically) more closely allied to speaking and reading seems more closely allied to writing.