Cognitive Processes in Audience Decision Making 117potential subscribers out of this group, these three categories. And they have a goal
of reaching an initial subscription of 40,000 and 160,000 within fi ve years. Okay. That’s
understandable.]When the reading process is going smoothly, readers are usually unaware of it. But when some-thing makes comprehension diffi cult, they often become aware of their process and may comment
on it.^120 For example, as the investor continued reading the executive summary of Smartphone
MBA ’s business plan, he made a comment about the diffi culty of comprehending the following
sentence.
With the consent of Limited Partners holding as a group a 50% Partnership Interest in
the Partnership, the General Partner may raise capital in excess of such amount by sell-
ing additional Limited Partnership Interests. [13. What the heck does that mean? It says
your Limited Partnerships start out with 15% of the partnership. This is really poorly
written.]Listeners’ Comprehension
In contrast to the way readers comprehend written sentences, listeners’ comprehension of spoken
sentences depends on how the sentences are spoken, not just on their content and structure. One
classic study of face-to-face communication concluded that only 7% of the meaning of a spoken
message is communicated verbally. Because the meaning of a spoken message depends in large part
on the emotion the speaker communicates, the remaining 93% of the meaning is communicated by
the speaker’s tone of voice and facial expression.^121 For a listener, a sarcastic versus an enthusiastic
tone of voice can convey more meaning than the words in a sentence. Chapter 6 explores the pro-
cess listeners go through as they infer a speaker’s emotions.
Listeners base much of their syntactic analysis of spoken sentences on sentence prosody —theway the speaker rhythmically groups and accentuates the words in the sentences she speaks. Lis-
teners prefer a syntactic analysis of a sentence that is consistent with sentence prosody and base
much of their semantic analysis on sentence prosody as well.^122 They actively listen for the words
speakers accentuate^123 because they realize that accented words are cues to the meaning of the speak-
ers’ messages.^124
Brain Regions Activated. Neuroscientists fi nd that when listeners process sentence prosodyregions of the right temporal lobe^125 and also a region in the right frontal lobe are activated (see
Figure 3.4 , p. 108).^126 Damage to the regions in the right temporal lobe causes defects in a listener’s
ability to interpret prosody^127 as well as diffi culties in interpreting others’ nonverbal communication.
The following repeated sentence^128 shows how different placements of a vocal accent canchange the meaning of a sentence entirely. The accented word in examples 1 through 5 is in bold
and italicized. A fi nal rise in intonation is added to the italicized word in example 6. One possible
meaning of each of the six sentences is suggested in parentheses.
(1) He’s giving this money to Tyler. ( He is the one giving the money; nobody else.)
(2) He’s giving this money to Tyler. (He is giving , not lending, the money.)
(3) He’s giving this money to Tyler. (The money is this particular money.)
(4) He’s giving this money to Tyler. ( Cash is being exchanged, not a check.)
(5) He’s giving this money to Tyler. (The recipient is Tyler , not Evan or Ethan.)
(6) He’s giving this money to Tyler? (Why is he giving the money to Tyler and not to me?)