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Each member of 48 married couples (Cs) sent a standard set of ambiguous messages to his or her spouse and decoded a similar set received from the spouse. The ambiguous messages were designed so that the verbal content could have a positive, neutral, or negative meaning depending on the nonverbal communication that accompanied it. All messages were rated by groups of judges who categorized each error as related to encoding or decoding. Females were better encoders than males, particularly with regard to positive messages. Cs with high marital adjustment were able to communicate more effectively, especially in the case of the husbands who sent more clear messages and made fewer errors than those in the low marital adjustment group. Females also had a higher percentage of the errors on their messages accounted for by their spouses' decoding than did males. (49 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Patricia Noller (1980) studied this question.