Language Blog

Being in a conversation were I was not permitted to speak and having people who could, was a little challenging. Using hand signs, body language, and non-verbal vocalization was somewhat hard to transmit because of what I wanted my partners to understand about what I was saying. I know some basic ASL; therefore I kind of know how to start a basic conversation, but not being able to use it, was also kind of hard since most of the time I was tempted to do it. The expressions of my partners during the conversation was a little awkward since we were literally playing the “guess what I’m saying game." I remember sometimes trying really hard for them to understand me and when they would they would be like “ohhh so that’s what you meant” They did alter their way of communicating with me due to the absence symbolic communication since our nature of communication is through voice mainly, we of course use hand signs to help us our project or transmit what we mean in an everyday conversation but voice is to me one of the strongest features we humans posses.  The culture that would have the advantage in communicating with more complex ideas would be the speaking one, voice emphasizes our ability to communicate and express our ideas, emotions, and feelings due to our tone voice.  The speaking culture would simply relate to them in a more precise patient manner. In my opinion I think that they would try to understand them but their way of communication would be drastically slow and not that precise. Individuals in our culture that have difficulty communicating with spoken language would be Deaf and special need people.   Living from my own experiences I happen to have a Down syndrome little brother. He happens to be three years old by now but he hasn’t yet developed his speech due to his situation we use both speaking and sign language but when he tries to tell us something he would practically use signs so we can understand him. Know that he’s little it is kind of normal for everyone in the house but also happen to had met a few people who were Deaf. This affects the ones that we speak to interact with these individuals because along with them we have to get adapted to a new environment and new techniques in being able to communicate with other individuals who do not have the capacity to communicate through voice. It takes lots of patience and time to interact with them but it is also amazing how besides voice humans have developed other techniques to communicate as in this case sign language.

Part of two of the experiment to me was even more difficult than the first one.  Truly I was not able to last for the whole 15 minutes of using only speech for communication. What made this experiment difficult for me was the absence of facial expressions and hand movements, at first I thought it was not going to be that hard only using my voice and not raising or lowering the tone but after three minutes or so passed I was able to realize how some of the physical embellishments are important and necessary, in this case the facial gestures are in all human’s way for communication. My partners seemed to be really affected by my communication limitations since meanwhile and after the conversation she would tell me that she felt that she was talking to a robot or some kind of toy being programmed but not showing feelings about what was being expressed.  In my opinion I think that non-speech language techniques are really important in our ability to communicate effectively since we need to show emotion and accompanied our speech with hand movements, that is our common human way of communicating and how we are used to. I believe that there are people who have difficulty reading body language therefore having a little trouble on understanding and reading it. An example of adaptive benefit to possessing the ability to read body language would be when a parent tells their son/daughter to do something and even if they are not willing to do it and go for it because it ‘s a command and feel that they have to do it since their parents are the ones that have authority over them but seeing their son/daughter facial gestures they can mostly read what their body language is transmitting for example a disagreement face not wanting to do what they were asked to. Environmental conditions where there might be a benefit not reading boy language would be when someone is making fun of someone else, talking something negative about someone else or when there is rivalry between two or a group of people because it would lead to complications and make things worse.