JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY / March 2000 Ng et al. / INDIVIDUALISM AND COLLECTIVISM COMMUNICATION CORRELATES OF INDIVIDUALISM AND COLLECTIVISM Talk Directed at One or More Addressees in Family Conversations SIK HUNG NG

and a sample of 15,988 turns of talk was coded under single- and multiaddressee turns. As predicted, the two types of turns varied with cultural individualism/collectivism in both inter- and subcultural comparisons. Single-addressee turns were more common in European (individualistic) than in Chinese (collectivistic) families, and in high (indi-vidualistic) than in low (collectivistic) acculturated Chinese families; the reverse was true for multiaddressee turns. The predicted relationship was confirmed by an individual-level comparison: Members of Chinese families who were highly acculturated used more single- and fewer multiaddressee turns when compared with less highly acculturated members. This relationship was unaffected by language (English or Chinese) or age of family members. In a separate analysis of the effect of turn types on turn taking, it was found that multiaddressee turns were associated with more false starts (two or more members started talking simultaneously). Implications of the results for cross-cultural and communication research were discussed. Individualism and collectivism constitute one of four basic dimen-sions for describing and comparing cultures (Hofstede, 1980). Their importance in cross-cultural research, more so than the other dimen-sions, has been attested to by four major reviews in the last decad