Language Experiment

Part One: No Symbolic Language

1.     This half of the experiment was relatively easy. It was kind of like playing charades… all I had to do was remember not to speak. I felt like I wasn’t even really participating in the conversation most of the time because I couldn’t contribute any new topics and it was pretty hard to ask questions.

2.     I had the conversation with my wife. She is a sociology major who studied a lot of theory, and I think that influenced the outcome. Basically, I told her what I needed to do for this assignment, and it gave her free license to talk at me for 15 minutes about theories of symbolic and gestural communication. In that regard, yes, she changed the way she talked to me because she knew why I was only using gestural communication. She used the opportunity to tell me about a sociologist named Mead, I gave her a lot of thumbs-up.

3.     The culture using symbolic communication clearly has the advantage in communicating complex ideas. Without it, you can essentially do nothing but respond, and even that is simplistic. You cannot reason, convince someone of something, explain your logic, or describe anything that you can’t physically describe. The culture who uses symbolic communication might view the other culture as inferior, or its members less intelligent, because individuals from the culture would have no way of expressing complex or abstract ideas. Having children, I am familiar with at least one subset of the population that has trouble communicating with spoken language. Of course it affects how people interact with them! A good example is my son, who is 2 but very advanced verbally. He spoke in complete, complex sentences at 1 year old. My wife and I actually got a laugh out of this very idea. People would baby talk our son, and he would respond with a very grown-up sounding answer. Once people realized he could communicate, the way they spoke to him was a very different story. They figured that because he could speak, his intellectual development was greater than they had assumed because of his age. Children are one group who have yet to develop the ability to communicate with spoken language, and this is reflected in our culture as infantilizing “baby talk”: because a child cannot speak, he is expected also not to understand. It speaks to the way perceived intelligence is tied to our use of symbolic communication.

Part Two: No Gestural Communication

1.     This part was much harder than the first! I kept slipping up during the 15 minutes and my wife would catch me. Nonverbal communication just happens so naturally, it’s really hard to stop yourself from doing it. It requires a lot more effort to control than simply not talking.

2.     She pointed out that it was annoying to listen to me talk, and it was impossible to pick up on emotional cues. My sense of humor is fairly dry anyway, but it was hard for her to understand when I was joking.

3.     Nonverbal communication is very important, especially for giving and receiving social cues and emotion. My wife stated that it would have been hard to understand my intent if we weren’t married and didn’t know each other well. Based on that feedback, I think it’s a very valid point that nonverbal communication, or ‘signs’, are very important in being able to read the intentions or meaning of other people.

4.     I believe I am correct in saying that individuals with autism have difficulty reading and interpreting body language, which hampers their ability to pick up on social cues. Body language is very important in communicating things to other people that symbolic language may not explicitly state; one example might be asking someone if they are okay and them responding “yes” but looking like they’re about to cry. The look on their face communicates more about the real answer to the question than their words. As an adaptive benefit, humans might be able to pick up on emotions like anger, which would allow them to avoid potentially dangerous confrontations, or fear, which could alert them to hazards in the environment that they should be wary of themselves. I don’t know a way in which body language could be a negative adaptation... maybe in poker?