Adult acquisition of message-production skill

While communication scholars place considerable emphasis on skill training, the systematic study of adult communication-skill acquisition has lagged behind the study of skilled performance in other fields and behavioral domains. lt is particularly noteworthy that we know, very little of the course of skill acquisition over time or of the role of repeated learning trials in skill development. One of the aims of the research reported here was to establish an experimental paradigm that would permit systematic investigations of such issues. This paradigm was then employed in three studies involving a total of 1,830 messages. In Study 1, the course of skill acquisition in message production conformed to the same sort of power law, that characterizes skill development for relatively simple motor and cognitive responses. Indeed, the power model accounted for an average of 71 percent of the variance in the time required for subjects to complete a message-production task. In Study 2, which had slightly different message-production instructions, the power model accounted for an average of 53 percent of the variance in message-production time. Finally, in Study 3 the power model appeared to apply, even when the number of message trials was doubled, and also to characterize the course of performance improvements when message trials were resumed after a delay of several days. Methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.