Language Experiment...

Part 1

Since I didn’t have a lot of willing participants for this assignment, I had to enlist the help of my brother who is the most easy going person I know.  Initiating the conversation was difficult since neither one of us knew what to talk about.  In order to get the conversation going, I used a calendar as a prop and began by pointing to dates on the calendar to see if he knew what I was asking him.  The first questions were easy as he remembers almost everyone’s birthday.  The harder question for him was our parent’s anniversary.  I used various symbols such as holding up numbers for the number of years they were married, to the symbol of people walking, to represent two people walking together down an aisle, to hands together to symbolize prayer. (If any of these symbols happen to overlap with ASL, it would have been purely coincidental since I don’t know ASL).  He got the individual meanings of each symbol, and came close to guessing the number of years married, 44, and the people walking together symbol, and that hands together in prayer meant church, so after repeating these symbols several times, he was able to understand that their combined meaning was anniversary.  I am not sure if the entire communication using hand expressed symbols lasted 15 minutes, although it felt like at least that much time had lapsed for him to get the meaning of each question I was asking him using only hand expressed symbols.

Part 2

Before this assignment, I had printed out the “just so stories” posted on last week’s blog about mimic the octopus.  I decided to read him each story without moving my hands, changing the inflection of my voice or looking up at all during the reading.  I read each story in an even consistent tone of voice, although I broke character a couple of times by laughing because some of those stories are so funny, its hard not to laugh.  At the end of reading, I asked him in the same tone of voice which story he liked the best.  He said they all sounded the same to him.  Anyone who took the time to read everyone’s “just so story” knows that each story was very unique and while some had some similar themes none of the stories were alike.  Therefore it was easy to conclude that without including any other elements of communication, such as changing the inflection of the voice or head movement or eye contact, that the words did not seem convey different meanings. I recall from some of my previous studies that it has been cited that approximately 90% of language is non-verbal. I followed up with this by reading an article online that also referenced that 70% to 90% of language is in fact non verbal (http://faculty.buffalostate.edu/smithrd/UAE%20Communication/Unit2.pdf).  It is clear from conducting this experiment and the literature on language that non-verbal language plays a huge part in the process of communication.  Therefore it gives us some clues to how our early ancestors were able to expand non verbal communication into a much more elaborate form communication using the alphabet or characters like those used in Asian cultures.  Although the fossil record cannot provide a complete picture about how language evolved in hominins or Neanderthals, it is possible to understand how simple non verbal cues could lead to a much more elaborate system of language that we use today.  It is amazing to me that some symbols are universal no matter what language you speak. For example, the flashing symbol of a hand, clearly means to “stop” and the picture of someone walking means “go.”