I found this experiment quite easy because, when I talk I use a lot of hand gestures and facial expressions as it is, so it made the conversation on my part quite easy. But on another hand trying to understand my partner was very difficult.
My partner had a easy time understanding me but, when it came to trying to communicate with me with hand gestures and facial expressions she had a difficult time showing what she wanted to say. Trying to understand her on my part was misunderstood but when it came down to what were both trying to say she understood me quite well and I only understood a quarter of what she was hand gesturing.
Even though me and my partner both come from the same culture which would be easy to explain with hand gestures, I think with hand gestures and facial expression it would be much easier to the explain the Chinese and Jewish cultures. The attitude that the speaking culture might have on the culture that does not use symbolic language might be either in a way that their talking about us and have a angry reaction or have a little understanding and have no reaction but watch and seek what their trying to say. Individuals in our culture that have difficulty communicating with spoken languages but, usually get understood by the other communicators with spoken languages. Individuals in our culture won't understand the spoken languages but, the spoken language individual will try to have some sort of effective communication to our culture.
This experiment was not as difficult as the first one but, not making any physical embellishments made it difficult for me because when I speak I always use some kind of expression.
My partners reaction toward my communication was a blank emotion and kind of awkward because she also uses hand gestures and facial emotion and just keeping her expressions blank made it awkward for her.
In this experiment it shows that "signs" are very effective in our language because body language and spoken words are what makes our word even more effective to people and makes it easier to understand. Non-speech language techniques in our ability to communicate is very effective it shows our expression what we might be talking about show the effective or importance of things it gives a little bit more of a push to our words.
I think there are a lot of people who can't read body language but that might be because they might not quite understand emotion or importance of certain words.A process of adapting to the understanding of body language is looking at their facial expression and the pitch of their voice which can determine a expression or emotion. I can't describe one environmental condition were there is not a benefit out of body language, body language benefits a lot. Body language can advance you in many ways for example speeches or even in your comprehension where you have to respond back in a effective way. Either way language it self is very important it's a way that advances our world everyday.
It sounds like you did the experiment the hard way! The only one who had to communicate with just body language in the first part was you (this applies to the second part as well). Your partner could use symbolic language, but it allowed you to get a feel for the problem from both sides of the conversation. It did make it harder to read your partner's response, however, since she was also having to figure out how to communicate without language.
ReplyDeleteI agree that communication is possible between one culture with symbolic language and another without, but that wasn't really the question. Which one would have the advantage? You start to approach the question but then back off. Think of it in terms of evolutionary advantage. Which culture would be more likely to survive, the speaking culture or the non-speaking culture?
Can you think of a specific group of people who would have problems reading body language? Regarding the advantages of not reading body language, how about circumstances where body language might be misleading, such as if you would visit a different culture where they used different body language?
Otherwise, good post.
It is interesting to find that you and your partner did a sort of switch off in terms of participating in the assignment. It serves as a good way to gain perspective on both sides of the picture, both ways. In the part where you mentioned the Chinese and Jewish culture, you kind of lost me, I didn't really understand what the correlation was between that and using symbolic language. Otherwise, I enjoyed reading your post and your commentary on the benefits of language altogether.
ReplyDeleteI thought the complete opposite of you on the first experiment. I thought it was very hard to do. . I thought it was cool u switched roles too. I thought you put a good amount of detail and used good grammar. Overall good job.
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