LECTURE 5

COMMUNICATION (VERBAL COMPONENT)

What Is Communication?

Communication is the process through which participants create and share information with one another as they move toward reaching mutual under­standing, Communication is involved in every aspect of daily life, from birth to death. It is universal. Because communication is so pervasive, it is easy to take it for granted and even not to notice it.

One way to understand the crucial role of communication in all human activities is to consider individuals who have had little or no human communication.

Isolates are children who for some reason have grown up without talking to anyone. While physically human, such isolates cannot talk or read and are completely lacking in social relationship skills. Some isolates were kept in an attic or a basement and fed regularly but not allowed contact with humans. When such isolates have been freed from their isolation, often when they are adolescents, they are socially much like infants. Communication with others is essential to the process of personality development and socializing.

Feral children are humans who have been raised by animals. A number of accounts of feral children are available. While some may be of doubtful authenticity, several cases provide fascinating insights into what it is like to grow up without human interaction. Feral children illustrate the essentially social nature of being human. If one cannot communicate, one will not assimilate the qualities associated with being human.

What are the main elements in the communication process through which participants create and share information with one another in order to reach a mutual understanding? Human communication is never per­fectly effective. The receiver usually does not decode a message into exactly the same meaning that the source had in mind when encoding the message. A code is a classification such as a language used by individuals to categorize their experience and to communicate it to others. Decoding is the process by which the physical message is converted into an idea by the receiver. Encod­ing is the process by which an idea is converted into a message by a source.

When the source and the receiver do not share a common value regarding the message content, effec­tive communication is unlikely to occur, leading to conflict. The more dissimilar (heterophilous) the source and receiver, the more likely that their com­munication will be ineffective.

Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Communication

"Language is primarily a vocal actualization of the tendency to see reality symbolically" (Edward Sapir, 1921). Communication is fundamentally intrapersonal. Intrapersonal communication is information exchange that occurs inside of one person. It is the process of selecting and interpreting symbols to represent thoughts, perceptions, or physical reality. In contrast, interpersonal communication involves the face-to-face exchange of informa­tion between two or more people. Interpersonal communication is the pro­cess of exchanging mutually understood symbols.

The place to begin understanding communication is in the way that people process messages internally. Language allows humans to perceive reality symbolically. Words and their meanings allow people to be human beings. Humans use symbols as mental events to represent physical reality, as well as their hopes and dreams. If a person did not engage in thinking processes, that person could not learn to communicate using symbols.

Intercultural communication also begins with intrapersonal communica­tion and ways of thinking. Levels of meaning suggest that meaning is assigned to messages during the decoding process, rather than residing in messages to be discovered. Based on our experiences, we develop attitudes, beliefs, and values that then influence the meanings we assign. Our culture accounts for a very large portion of what we experience and how we interpret the experience. Culture is critical in the meaning assignment pro­cess, which is fundamental to human communication.

Intercultural communication depends on an understanding of the belief system of the other person. Cultural belief systems serve as message filters that determine, to a certain degree, the meaning each person assigns to mes­sages and how events are perceived. The notion of cultural-ways-of-thinking is used here in a broad sense to include religions, countries, cultures, belief systems, and behaviorally and demographically defined groups (e.g. Asian, New York, European, rural, Buddhist, elderly, poor, etc.). This is riot to imply that there is, for example, an "elderly way of thinking." Rather, it is to suggest that the concerns and concepts of specific groups and cultures act as important filters when members of cultural groups receive messages and observe behaviors. Understanding different cultural ways of thinking allows us to understand and predict, to an extent, the ways in which individ­uals from a given culture will respond to specific intercultural interactions.

Language

Language is a key influence in intercultural communication. Lan­guage is the use of vocalized sounds, or written symbols representing these sounds or ideas, in patterns organized by grammatical rules in order to express thoughts and feelings. The people of a particular nation or ethnic group who share a language usually share a common history and a set of traditions. Speaking a particular language gives an individual a cultural identification. If the language of a cultural group disappears, the members of the cultural group find it difficult or impossible to maintain their culture, and they will be assim­ilated into another language/culture. An example is the Irish people, who lost their language (Celtic), and have become assimilated, at least in part, into English culture. As we have discussed, many immigrants to the United States in past decades have been assimilated into the melting pot of U.S. society.

All people are captives of the language they speak.

Edward Hall (1966)