and sociolinguistics--and much research can be viewed as an attempt to
empirically test ideas and findings from other fields in an experimentally
rigorous fashion. Finally, we provide a brief overview of each chapter with an
emphasis on how it embodies the book's goal of integrating social and
cognitive approaches to interpersonal communication.

The field of interpersonal communication is clearly immense, and
comprehensive coverage of all approaches to this topic would far exceed the
page limitations of this book. The decision to select contributors for such a
volume is difficult and necessarily entails a focus on some aspects of
communication at the expense of others. In this section we briefly describe the
ways in which we have limited the content of this volume and the motivations
behind our decisions.

Collecting contributions from psychologists whose theories and research focus
on the production and comprehension of verbal language was our obvious way
of limiting the scope of this volume. Although individual chapters discuss the
relationship between verbal communication and closely aligned disciplines, such
as nonverbal communication, paralinguistics, decision making, memory, and
norms of social interaction, all contributions share a primary focus on spoken or
written language. It should be emphasized that this limitation is not meant to
imply that we consider nonverbal and paralinguistic phenomena to be of lesser
importance to interpersonal communication; rather, it reflects our goal of
illustrating the many ways a joint social-cognitive approach can be usefully
applied to a relatively narrow set of research problems

A second way we limited the scope of this volume was to solicit contributions
that discuss experimental research on language use and understanding, as
opposed to case studies, observational research, or purely theoretical
discussions. This decision was motivated by our desire to provide a body of
work illustrating the strengths of experimental psychological research for
answering key questions regarding human communication. Thus, this volume
makes an excellent companion for recent volumes that focus on alternative
approaches to communication (e.g., Carter & Presnell, 1994; Coulthard, 1992;
Leeds-Hurwitz, 1995; Markova & Foppa, 1990) and fleshes out other volumes

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