Week 7 - Language Blog

Although this assignment was relatively easy to accomplish, I found it was rather difficult to find time to sit with one of my family members and have them actively participate in helping me with my assignment. But once I was able to partner up with my sister during a weeknight dinner, we both found that it is fun and interesting to learn how language is much more complex than it seems.

It was very difficult to communicate without using my spoken language. This is because I wasn’t able to express most of my ideas even though we are allowed to use hand signals, body language, gestures and facial expressions. However, my sister found it very entertaining that I was able to only react and not necessarily contribute my own thoughts on the subjects she discussed to me. She definitely took advantage of the fact that I couldn’t respond verbally and that I showed so much restraint in actually blurting out what I was thinking. So she did ultimately change the way she usually communicates with me since she spoke a lot more about herself only because I couldn’t really talk about my day. She did try to ask me questions to test how I would respond, but that ended quickly when it got boring and my responses were insufficient.

It also was very difficult to communicate using language but omitting the use of every other type of communication. Part two was definitely my favorite part because it was so funny to explain my ideas without using tone. I tried my best not to laugh because it was truly ridiculous to talk about certain topics that demand use of an appropriate tone. I would speak my normal self without any change in tone but It would just come off as robotic and I sounded like the first-version of Siri. My partner initially didn’t alter the way she spoke but ultimately she ended up mimicking my lack of tone to a certain degree. In the end we found it hilariously awkward since she lessened her tone so much and stopped using hand gestures almost automatically in order to mirror my energy.

Throughout part one my partner had the most control of the conversation. My responses were very limited to thumbs up, thumbs down, frowning, grinning, head tilting, eyebrow raising, and throwing up hands in frustration. She on the other hand, drove the conversation using all forms of communication including hand gestures, facial expressions and changes in tone.

If my sister represents a culture that uses spoken language and I represent a culture that doesn’t, that means she has most of the power without a doubt. Just like how my sister took advantage of my inability to speak at the moment, I feel that a culture that uses spoken language would naturally do the same to a culture that doesn’t use spoken language. There is this underlying lack of respect and consideration to a culture that is unable to express themselves using spoken language.

In part two, she was very comfortable in speaking in her normal self but as the conversation progressed, she started to subconsciously mirror my lack of tone, facial expressions, and hand gestures. In the end, we both sat across from each other with our hands on our laps, flat facial expression, monotone voice, and growing awkward silence. So part two gave me a lot more power than in part one. I was the one who drove the atmosphere of the conversation to say the least.

Non-speech language is very important in conveying deeper meaning that spoken language fails to express by itself. Without using body language, you pose a sort of threat to the other person because they are unable to read your intentions and feelings. This is due to acquired experience that teaches us to trust those who express themselves in a honest way and that way we can know if they are dangerous or trustworthy.

Being able to effectively read body language can inevitably save your life because as we’ve learn through this experiment, it conveys deeper meaning than just listening to words. We’ve all experienced times where you feel unsure to trust someone based on something they said or maybe how they said it. You can obtain resources by changing your tone and using the right gestures and facial expressions to gain the trust of another person. To reproduce successfully, a person has to show that they have survival skills which may mean that he or she needs to be able to obtain resources through effective communication skills.

There are people who lie within the autistic spectrum who may have a hard time understanding regular people because they don’t have the ability to recognize emotions, or discern between positive and negative feelings of other people. They might also have a hard time conveying their message by not understanding how to change their tone or use proper non-speech techniques that help other people understand them as well. There is the issue of different culture also being uable to communicate with each other due to language barriers that include hand gestures as well as spoken language. Another obstacle would be cultural backgrounds which determine how one tends to express themselves to other people.