Abstract
Students encountering each other for the first time were asked to converse for 30 minutes either face-to-face or through online chat. Conversational quality was compared to examine the possibility that specific social differences in communicative style are reduced or erased in online chat. As expected, gender differences evident in face-to-face conversation were absent online. However, conversational differences between experienced and inexperienced online chat users were, on the whole, similar across conditions. More generally, online chat appeared to produce less sequential connectivity, greater self-focus, and less other-focus than did face-to-face conversation.
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