LECTURE 11: EXTRALINGUISTIC COMMUNICATION
COMMUNICATING THROUGH THE BODY, SOUND, AND TIME
Body language
Communication experts say that an understanding of the actual words spoken by people contribute only
between seven to ten percent to our comprehension of the overall message that is communicated. In
addition, such things as intonation (patterns of rising and falling voice pitch), rate of speaking (slow, fast),
and non-word sounds (grunts, laughter) also contribute to our comprehension. Tone of voice can indicate
pleasure, anger, amusement, sarcasm, and the like. (“I hate you” can mean, “I love you” when we say it
in a certain tone of voice. Try it on yourself before you try it on someone whom you love, though!) These
additional non-word ways of conveying meaning also involve sound, as do the spoken words, and they
contribute another 20% to 23% to our comprehension.
Another cultural area is the distance between two people who are having a conversation. This distance
depends on the relationship between the two speakers. For example, two North American friends who are
having a personal conversation will keep a distance of two or three feet between them. There are many
other cultural examples of body language – how you wave goodbye, how long you maintain eye contact
with another person, hand gestures that express approval or disapproval, and how you hold your head and
body when listening to someone else are a few. Unfortunately, the problem is that we do not always
realise that these are cultural matters, so we tend to make judgements about other people. People from an
“eyes down“ culture think that North American children are very rude when they look at the eyes of an
adult or a teacher. North Americans think that South Americans are too friendly (i.e. they get too close)
in impersonal situations. These judgements add difficulty to communication between cultures.
Type of
Speech
Transaction
Distance
between
North Americans
Impersonal
Type of
Speech
Interaction
South Americans
4 feet
No
information
2-3 feet
?
?
Closer than
2 feet
?
?
Figure 8.1 Spatial (Proxemic) elements in Culture
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Non-verbal Communication
People communicate by their actions as well as by the language noises they make. For human beings,
language is quite clearly the most obvious tool of communication, but then it is not the only one or
arguably even the most important.
There are many different cultures in the world, and in each of them the children must learn a great many
things that are expected of everyone who participates effectively in that culture. These things are taken
for granted by everyone who shares the culture. In other words, nobody needs to describe in detail or
write down everything, or consciously try to teach them to children. In fact, children begin to learn
elements of their culture even before they develop linguistic skills to understand a verbal description of
what they are learning or supposed to be learning in their culture. Proponents of behaviourist learning
theory have sometimes called this kind of learning ‘imitation’, but this is much too simple an explanation
for the complex processes that go on when a child learns what is normally expected of him or her in the
community. Most of the norms are communicated non-verbally, and he internalises them as if no other
possibilities existed. They are as much a part of the child as his own body, meaning that he would not
question them except in very rare situations.
What are the things that children learn non-verbally? One of the simplest examples to observe and
analyse and discuss is the way people use clothing and body ornamentation to communicate. At any
given point in time in a particular culture, there is an accepted normal way to dress and to arrange one’s
hair, to paint the face, and to wear jewellery. By adopting such conventions to dress himself, the person
communicates to the world that he wants to be treated according to the standards of the culture for which
they are appropriate. When a black person in America rejects the normal American dress and puts on
African clothing, he is communicating to the world that he wants to be treated as an Afro-American. On
the surface, dressing up in unusual costumes would seem to be one of the more innocent forms of dissent
that a person cold express, but in fact it is deeply resented by many people who still feel bound by the
traditional conventions of their culture and who become fearful or angry when those norms are violated.
The non-verbal message that such a costume communicates is “I reject your culture and your values.”
and those who resent this message can be violent in their response.
Eye contact also has an important role in regulating conversational interactions. In America, a typical
pattern is for the listener to signal that he is paying attention by looking at the speaker’s mouth or eyes.
Since direct eye contact is often too intimate, the speaker may let his eyes wander elsewhere. As the
moment arrives for the speaker to become the listener and for his partner to begin talking, there will often
be a preliminary signal. The speaker will often look towards the listener, and the listener will signal that
he is ready to speak by glancing away.
Such eye signals will vary, of course, depending on what the people are talking about and what the
personal relation is between them. But whatever the eye signals people are using, they use them
unconsciously. If you try to become aware of your eye movements while you are speaking to someone,
you will find it extremely frustrating. As soon as you try to think self-consciously about your own eye
movements, you do not know where you should be looking. If you want to study how the eyes
communicate, therefore, you should do it by observing other people, not yourself. But if you watch other
people too intently, of course, you may disturb them or make them angry!
Eye communication seems particularly important for Americans. It is part of the American culture that
people should be kept at a distance and that contact with another person’s body should be avoided in all
but the most intimate situations. Because of this social convention of dealing with others at a distance,
Americans have to place much reliance on their distance receptors, their eyes and ears, for personal
communication. In other cultures, however, people normally come closer together and bodily contact
between conversational partners is as normal as eye contact is in America. In the eastern Mediterranean
cultures, for example, both the touch and the smell of the other person are expected.
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Other cultures have different spatial norms. In Latin America, for example, impersonal discussion
normally occurs at a distance of two or three feet, which is the distance that is appropriate for personal
discussion n North America. Consequently, it is impossible for a North and South American both to be
comfortable when they speak to one another unless one can adopt the zones that are normal for the other.
If the South American advances to a distance that is comfortable for him, it will be too close for the
North American, and he will withdraw, and one can chase the other all around the room unless something
intervenes to end the conversation. The North American seems aloof and unfriendly to the South
American. The South American seems hostile and oversexed to the North American. The anthropologist,
Edward Hall, mentions that North Americans sometimes cope with this difference by barricading
themselves behind desks or tables, and that South Americans have been known literally to climb over
these barriers to attain a comfortable distance at which to talk!
Sticking out the tongue and quickly drawing it back can be gesture of self-castigation in one culture, an
admission of a social mistake, but someone from another culture might interpret it as a gesture of ridicule
or contempt, and in the Eskimo culture it would not be gesture at all, but the conventional way of
directing a current of air when blowing out a candle. (Fill in this information in Figure 8.2 that follows
this section.) Just a little better communication on the non-verbal level may go a long way toward
improving international relations.
Body movements
Five classes of non-verbal body movements are as follows:
•
emblems - non-verbal behaviours that directly translate words or phrases; in other words, they
substitute for vocalisations e.g. “OK”, “come here”, “go away, etc.
•
illustrators - non-verbal messages that literally illustrate the verbal message
•
affect displays - facial expressions or movements that convet emotional meaning e.g. smile for
happiness, frown for uncertainty, etc.
•
regulators - non-verbal behaviours that maintain, monitor, or control other people’s speech e.g. to
slow down, to stop, to speak up, etc.
•
adaptors - non-verbal behaviours that satisfy some personal need, and usually done in private e.g.
scratching, adjusting one’s own clothes, etc.
Facial Movements
Facial messages serve to communicate various types of emotions. Generally speaking, these include
affect displays, that is, expressing emotions through facial movement. The primary affect displays are
happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust or contempt. Affect blends are said to involve at
least 33 combinations of these six primary emotions through a variety of facial management techniques.
•
Facial management techniques:
1. Intensifying - to exaggerate a feeling
2. Deintensifying - to underplay a feeling
3. Neutralising - to hide a feeling
4. Masking - to replace or substitute the expression of one emotion for another
•
•
•
•
facial feedback hypothesis - your facial expression influences your level of psychological arousal
influence of context and culture
encoding-decoding accuracy
micromomentary expressions
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USE OF SPACE, TOUCH, SMELL AND ARTIFACT
Eye Movements
Functions of eye communication - four major functions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
to seek feedback
to regulate the conversation
to signal the nature of the relationship
to compensate for increased physical distance
Eye avoidance functions:
1. civil inattention - politely not looking or staring at someone or something to allow others their
privacy
2. turn maintaining - avoiding eye contact during a conversation to maintain one’s turn
Paralanguage
Paralanguage is the sound and tone of the verbal message. Although it is vocal or spoken, it is non-verbal
because it indicates how something is said rather than what is said. Some functions of this aspect of
speech are as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
to make judgements about people
to make judgements about communication
to enhance persuasiveness and credibility
to help comprehension of listener
to state preferences
Silence
Silence is a very powerful way of communication. Yes, we do communicate by not speaking up at all!
You must have heard of the expression, ‘the silence is deafening’, or as Ralph Waldo Emerson once
remarked to a critic, “What you don’t say is so loud that I can’t hear what you are trying to say”… The
specific functions of silence may be said to include the following:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
to take time to think
to hurt
to respond to personal anxiety
to prevent communication
to communicate emotional responses
when you have nothing to say
Temporal (Time) Communication
•
Chronemics - the use of time, how you organise it, how you react to it, and the messages it
communicates
•
Cultural time
1.
Technical time - precise, scientific time
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2.
3.
•
1.
2.
•
1.
2.
Formal time - how a culture defines and teaches time
Informal time - a loose use of time terms
Displaced or diffused time orientations
displaced - time is viewed exactly
diffused - time is seen as approximate rather than exact
Monochronism and Polychronism
monochronic - scheduling one thing at a time
polychronic - scheduling a number of things at the same time
•
Social clock - culture-specific time schedule that determines the right time to do a variety of
important things e.g. the right time to start going to school, to finish schooling, to get married, to buy
your own home, to have children, etc.
•
Psychological time - refers primarily to the importance you place on the past, present, and future
•
Time and status - time is linked to status considerations
•
Time and appropriateness - societal rules about when things should happen
Ŧ ♣ Task 8.1
1.
Identify the five classes of non-verbal movement. Give examples of each class.
2.
What are the four functions of eye movements?
3.
What does pupil size indicate in terms of non-verbal communication?
4.
What are some of the eye avoidance functions?
5.
How can we signal power through visual dominance behaviour?
6.
What personal adaptors are acceptable in public? Which ones are not acceptable?
7.
What are some of the rules we have in our society about eye contact?
Proxemics
Proxemics is the study of our use of space as a form of communication.
• Proxemics is space communication
• Spatial distance - four distances that define the type of relationship permitted
1. intimate distance - touching to 6-8 inches
2. personal distance - a three foot bubble protecting our personal space (11/2 - 4 feet)
3. social distance - from 4 - 12 feet (business and impersonal transactions)
4. public distance - from 12 - 25 feet
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� Influences on space communication
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
culture
status
context
subject matter
sex and age
positive and negative evaluations
� Theories about Space
1. protection theory - when you establishes a body-buffer zone around yourself as protection against
unwanted touching or attack
2. equilibrium theory - holds tha intimacy and distance vary together
3. expectancy violations - explains what happens when you increase or decrease the distance between
yourself and another in an interpersonal interaction
Territoriality
Territoriality refers to the claiming of space, sometimes illegitimately, for personal use.
•
Types of territories that people stake their claim to:
1. Primary territory - your exclusive preserve (e.g. your desk, your car)
2. Secondary territory - although they do not belong to you, they are associated with you perhaps
because you have occupied them for a long period of time or they have been assigned to you
3. Public territory - those areas that are open to all people (e.g. the park, a movie theatre, the beach)
•
Territorial encroachment is the violation -and/or unwarranted use of another’s territory (e.g. using
someone else’s office), mainly involving:
1. Invasion - entering another’s territory inappropriately (e.g. parent entering teenage son’s party)
2. Contamination - creating an impurity of someone’s territory (e.g. smoking in someone else’s car)
•
Reactions to encroachment:
1. Turf defence - defend our territory to expel intruders (e.g. gangs defend their area of the town)
2. Insulation - erecting a physical barrier (e.g. fences, using sunglasses)
3. Linguistic collusion - using language to exclude who encroach upon our territory (e.g. using
jargon, ambiguous language)
4. Withdrawal - leave the territory
•
Markers - physical indicators to claim possession
1. Central markers - use of objects to reserve (e.g. a coat over a chair to mark reservation of space)
2. Boundary markers - physical objects to establish boundaries (e.g. grocery store bar to separate
groceries
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3. Earmarkers - identifying marks to indicate possession (e.g. initialed briefcase, nameplates)
Touch Communication
Haptics is the study of human touching behaviour. People touch each other for a variety of reasons
during communication. The meanings of such touching behaviour are:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
•
Positive affect
Playfulness
Control
Ritual
Task-relatedness
who touches whom, and where:
1. gender differences and touch
2. culture differences and touch
•
touch avoidance
Smell communication
•
Types of messages communicated by smell include:
1.
2.
3.
4.
attraction messages
taste messages
memory messages
identification messages
Artifactual Communication
Artifacts are those objects made by human hands; includes colour, clothing, jewellery, and decorated
space
•
Types of artifactual messages
1.
2.
3.
4.
colour communication
clothing
jewellery
decoration
® Reflection
1. If someone treats space differently than you do (i.e. a sales person moves from a social space to a
personal distance), what is your reaction? Does this encroachment affect the communication from
taking place? How?
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2. Think of personal instances when an instinct to touch had a positive effect? A negative one? How
does smell qualify as a non-verbal message?
3. In what instances, personal or professional, might eye contact be a crucial factor in establishing a
positive factor? Give instances of personal experience and explain.
4. Do regulators enhance the flow of communication? Is it more difficult to establish a smooth flow of
communication over the phone when regulators are not clearly seen?
5. Give an example of an artefact that you use or wear. What does it communicate, and why do you use
it?
6. How can colour be a non-verbal communication?
7. Do you think people judge you by the clothes you wear? Why or why not?
_____________________________
“An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun,
or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or,
in its altered mood, by beams of kindness,
it can make the heart dance for joy.
joy.””
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
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