This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 18 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: some effects of nonstandard English in counseling; the status of speech instruction in Iowa high schools; communications analyses of a university and a public utility company; the relative efficacy of bibliotherapy and assertion training in learning assertiveness; male/female dominance in communication; disputed authorship of the "Liberty or Death" speech; the effect of two strategies on students' learning of standard language; the influence of room design on small group communication; the effects of rates of speech compression on student learning; antecedents of individual differences in students' social-cognitive and communicative performance; the effect of stereotyping, dialectical similarity, and issue relevance on interpersonal perception; the relationship between conformity and verbal behavior; error acceptability in written business communication; the development of conversational rules in children; the effect of communication messages upon the building of trust between sexes; and language standards and communicative style in the black church. (GW)