Language Experiment

Part 1:

This assignment was a lot of fun for me and I just happened to have my brother and his girlfriend in town from Las Vegas whom I haven't seen in over two years so I used the 30 (which in reality took the whole lunch hour because I kept messing up with the second challenge) minutes for this assignment with them as my partners in discussion. I did mention to them beforehand what I was doing so they wouldn't think I was just anti-social, my results were as follows:

This part of the exercise was fairly easy because I still could use body language and expressions.  So when they would talk about something interesting I would still be able to point at the person speaking and shake my head in agreeance and open my eyes wide with excitement.  I found that they did alter their way of talking to me but only in the sense that they wouldn't make eye contact with me unless they were asking me a question directly, usually only yes or no question however.  The conversation during this time frame was after we had all gone to a baseball game, so the majority of the 15 minutes was spent discussing how excited everyone was that the Angels had just won. So again it felt like I was still part of the conversation simply because I could at least physically show I was excited without having to speak words.

The culture that obvious has the advantage of communicating was my bother and his girlfriend because they could speak words and phrases and have use verbally.  So the conversation was more engaged between those two, and I felt at the end of the 15 minutes they got tired of me shaking my head vigorously with wide eyes and hands and fingers flying in their faces.  Communicating is a huge advantage to understanding somebody and knowing that they understand you.  I would compare it to someone who either doesn't speak English and all we can use is our limbs and facial expressions to possibly communicate, or even those that are mentally challenged we can't verbally communicate with.  We usually have to gauge their attitude or responses to our questions with only their body language since speaking is too difficult to understand, or simply can't be done. I feel we are less inclined to engage in conversations with people in the above-mentioned scenario if we know they can't have a conversation back with us. Also infants would be a good example, we know how they are feeling because of their body language, or when their crying, but they can't have conversations with us so we don't speak to them unless it's meaningless baby talk to get them to smile.


Part 2:

This assignment proved to be a lot harder than I would have initially imagined.  For starters, I kept using my hands and would have to start the 15 minutes over, or as my brother pointed out my eyebrows kept raising and my eyes would widen still.  I didn't fully make it a full 15 minutes with this exercise, I just couldn't maintain not using expressions in this assignment, especially when it came to altering my tone of voice.  I got nearly two sentences out and I would fail again.  Over the course of dinner I only achieved 4-5 minutes of actually doing this properly.  The monotone felt so uncomfortable and it usually resulted in all of us laughing and ending the seriousness tone. My partners were affected because they kept laughing at me and didn't want to hear my speak more than 5 words.  When I would sit and just listen to them, they did not once look at me to ask me a question or try to get me involved in the conversation at all, when I chimed in with my opinions or thoughts again it would end in laughter and got me no where.  This made it clear to me that being able to use signs and expressions was clearly a make it or break it deal on whether I was going to be construed as a fun person to engage in conversation with and they definitely made more of an attempt to "listen" to me when I could use body language and hand signs.  The use of signs is obviously so important in our language, but I feel from this experience it's mainly from the voice tone. At one point I could keep hands and facial expressions in check, by my voice tone would still want to fluctuate big-time, but I noticed even that small minor detail made me a little bit more exciting to talk to.

I feel for the most part body language is extremely easy to read, I would compare it almost to sarcasm and whether you can depict when someone is using it.  If it came down to not talking or using monotone the whole time versus sign and body language, I would truly prefer to use body language and sign language instead.  A group of  people who would not benefit from reading body language would be blind people, but that's being direct because they can't see obviously. An adaptive benefit to reading body language in one example would be for sex appeal.  You can tell usually if someone likes you due to your body language and communication skills.