Communication Experiment

 

• PART 1
• Did you find this experiment difficult or easy?  Describe your experience to explain your answer. (5 pts)

• I did find communicating to be more difficult just using just symbolic language. Since I was not allowed to use words in ASL, the conversation led to more of a charades game. At the end of the 15 minutes, I would say approximately 70% of what I was trying to say was actually understood by the other person. 

• What were the impressions of partners in the conversation? Did they alter their way of communicating with you because of your absence of symbolic communication? Describe. (5 pts)

• I would say that my communication partner was trying to piece together my side of the conversation with a fair amount of effort. She would ask more specific and basic questions so as to further the conversation. I would say that communication was severely hampered and it would take a while to actually get something across.

• Imagine that you and your partners in the conversation represent two different cultures meeting for the first time. Which culture has the advantage in communicating complex ideas?  What attitudes might the speaking culture have toward the culture that does not use symbolic language?  Identify individuals in our culture that have difficulty communicating with spoken language and explore how that affects how those who do speak interact with those individuals. (5 pts)

• When communicating with a person of another cultural background, I would say that the culture that relies more on verbal description rather than tonal/body expression would have an advantage when communicating complex ideas. The speaking culture representative would most likely have more variety of diction in their dialogue. That way, the conversation would be compensated for the lack of physical embellishments. Some individuals may struggle to communicate verbally, such as people who do not speak the same language and the disabled. These conditions would make communication a bit more difficult since the person cannot convey their thoughts fully. Therefore, the conversation would likely resort to replying on body language rather than verbal.

• PART 2

• Were you able to last for the full 15 minutes of using only speech for communicating? What made this experiment difficult for you? (5 pts)

• Without using intonation and body language in general, I found communication to still be relatively achievable. Although the actual emotion or expression was limited, I could still was able to properly express what I wanted to convey in my dialogue. Overall, in this exercise, I think the delivery of words is not as important as the words themselves.

• How were your partners in this part of the experiment affected by your communication limitations? (5 pts)

• When communicating, I would say that she did modify her questions to compensate for the lack of physical communication. For instance, when talking about an event that occurred at work she asked follow-up questions that suggested that she couldn’t pick up how I felt about the event itself. Besides that, I would say the conversation carried as normal.

• What does this experiment say about our use of “signs” in our language, i.e., how important is non-speech language techniques in our ability to communicate effectively? (5 pts)
• I would say that this experiment demonstrates that "signs" do help facilitate better conversations by providing the proper inflections to a subject when speaking. By itself, I would say that it is very difficult without a speaking counterpart.
• Are there people who have difficulty reading body language? Describe the adaptive benefit to possessing the ability to read body language.   Can you describe environmental conditions where there might be a benefit to not reading body language? (5 pts)
• There are people who have difficulty reading certain body language. More specifically, I would say that people of different cultural backgrounds are known to have assigned their own specific meaning to physical embellishments and signs. At the moment I would say it is always necessary to have the ability to ready body language.

PART 3

-Do you think your experiment in Part 1 would have been easier if you had been permitted to use written language? Why or why not?    (5 pts)

I think it would have definitely been easier to add writing because it would properly describe what I was trying to convey through an actual grammatical structure and punctuation.

-What advantage does written language provide to the culture that develops and uses it? (5 pts)

Besides creating physical records of things that have been previously communicated, I would say that it also helps those who are unable to communicate due to disability.

-What impact has written language had on “globalization”, or the spread of ideas around the world? (5 pts)

I think written language has been a means to communication with others that do not speak the same language through translation. While not perfect, it does allow a back and forth understanding on a mutual topic that can further globalization.