Language

Part 1:

I found this part of the experiment pretty easy while not communicating with words or ASL. As for my partner, they were able to express their points across more because I was not interrupting them in the middle of their sentences. I was still able to agree and disagree with them by either nodding or giving them a disapproving expression on my face. Throughout the conversation their tone tends not to change, because of the passion they have with whatever they wanted to talk about. As for the interaction of two different cultures meeting for the first time, it is assumed that the culture that is speaking would be the one communicating complex ideas. The attitudes that the speaking culture might have may go two ways: they may be passionate about what point they are trying to get across or they may be annoyed that the other culture isn’t expressing their ideas about the topic. Individuals in our culture that have difficulty communicating with spoken language is deaf people. When speaking with a deaf person, it may change the way those who speak with them because they obviously cannot hear what they are saying. People usually tend to speak slower so that the deaf person can make out what words they are saying by reading their lips.

Part 2:

To be completely honest, I was not able to last 15 minutes of only using speech for communicating. I feel like there was no emotion in my words, so I felt like my partner could not fully understand what I was saying. Because I felt like they couldn’t understand, I had to keep repeating myself but in different words. Every single time, I felt unsatisfied by the way I was speaking to them. My partner’s reaction toward this experiment was very confused and/or bored, as if they did not want to listen to what I had to say. They were very uninterested in the topic I was talking about. This shows that “signs” in our language is very important in able to properly express our point. Most would not take anyone seriously if there were no “signs” in their language. There are people who have difficulty reading body language. For one, blind people cannot even see the body language that is being expressed, so they obviously have difficulty in this. The adaptive benefit to possessing the ability to read body language is that they can understand what a person is feeling just by understanding certain body movements. Understanding one’s feelings before speaking with them can be beneficial in many ways between courting someone to interviewing for a job. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a scenario where it is beneficial to not read body language, because body language is what determines the attitude and mood of others.