Language

Part 1:

This week I engaged in a 15 minute conversation where I was not allowed to speak!! This experiment was extremely difficult for me. I am a person who is very verbal, enthusiastic and passionate about expressing my thoughts. With this being said, these 15 minutes felt like an ETERNITY for me! I chose to carry my typical morning conversations with my husband and kids—without the speaking part (of course).  When I began trying to express my thoughts through physical antics, my husband seemed puzzled, then very confused, and finally laughed at me saying, “it was awkward because I couldn’t communicate verbally, which comes natural to us”. My kids were getting very confused they wanted to know why I couldn’t just talk to them instead of acting out my thoughts. When I was using gestures to communicate with my kids it brought me to the feeling of when they were babies: I had to use so many hand gestures and movements to connect with them because that was their “language”. I felt like I was a baby trying to communicate with a parent. After an extensive five minutes, my husband eventually altered his way of communicating with me; using hand gestures and speaking slowly (as if I really did speak another language). I feel that if we represented two different cultures meeting for the first time that I would have had the advantage in communicating complex ideas. I think that the speaking culture would have a “snobby” and maybe even irritated attitude towards the culture that doesn’t use language because they know what they are trying to communicate but all they are getting in response would be antics. Babies and toddlers, everywhere, have difficulty communicating with spoken language and it affects adults and older children that do interact with them.  As adults we try to interact with babies by overly expressing our emotions and speaking slowly and loudly to convey our feelings and words. In the experiment, this is how my husband was trying to convey his thoughts to me while I couldn’t speak. I definitely felt like a baby.

Part 2:

In the second half of the experiment, I engaged in another 15 minute conversation, however this time without any physical signals, vocal intonation or body/facial movements. I could not last the entire 15 minutes! This experiment was very difficult for me because I naturally use a lot of body and facial expressions to communicate. Every two minutes I realized I would raise and lower my voice or smile.  I carried on this rather boring conversation with my husband. He said, “I lost all track of our conversation due to the monotonous tone…it was really, really boring…sorry”. This experiment “speaks” for itself (haha).  Signs are so important to our language and our ability to communicate effectively. These “non-speech language techniques” play a large role in our communication on so many levels; it’s how we read others body language and how we are able to adapt to others emotions and antics while they speak. It pushes our language farther than just words, its feelings, passions, and insights.  There are many people who do, however have difficulty reading body language. I think it might be the way they grew up—maybe they weren’t social or brought up in a manner to think much of body language. I think an environmental condition that might have a benefit to not reading body language would be in the coldest places on Earth; where no one would want to stand in the freezing cold to move their faces or open their arms while speaking, allowing the cold to take hold of them.

Overall, I felt that this experiment reinforces the old saying, “Actions speak louder than words”.