Language Assignment Experiment

The participants in this language assignment experiments are conversations between my wife, and both my ten and eight-year-old daughters. I’ve decided to use random topics of conversations. This way everyone could speak about anything they feel is important to them and makes it easier for all individuals to share. From there the idea was to continue conversing on one topic or branch out to various ones. This is how the experiment went.

In the first conversation, we all sat together in the living room where we could see each other’s faces. I explained the rules and we began. In this conversation I became solely the listener and was restricted from speaking. I sat quiet, and as soon as my wife initiated the first words if discussion, I accidentally spoke the words “OK”. This meant that we had to restart our first trial, and so we did. The topic was instant; based on the amount of time I gave my daughters to play Roblox – an online video game. They had a maximum of two hours of playtime, and they were suggesting I give them more time to play. Their play time usually consists of joining their cousin online, so that they can play together. One of their concerns was that their game time expires close to the time that their cousin arrives to play with them. In my mind I was thinking that they should get in touch with their cousin in advance to set a time where all three of them login to play, that way they maximize their time as a group. My wife expressed the same solution, so I knew we agreed. As the conversation progressed, my wife brought up the fact that I should have picked a better time to do this experiment. She thought that it would have been a better idea if I would have notified them in advance of this experiment, instead of presenting it to them spontaneously. It was very difficult not being allowed to respond to each of their concerns, so I had to do a lot of head-nodding to show agreement. I also provided plenty of eye contact and my hand gestures consisted of both uniting my hands together in a relaxed manner or letting them rest on my knees. As each one spoke, I directed my attention to them. In some instances, in the conversation, my wife referenced my kid’s concerns and I would turn to look at them.  As I did this, there were a few times where my younger daughter asked me why I was staring at her, and my older one asked why I was nodding head so much. Of course, this was awkward for them, since I did it without saying a word. Fighting the urge to respond was the most difficult thing to do, because body language could not answer their questions, and you could only do so many gestures to agree or disagree. Not being able to provide a reason for my reactions was by far a challenge.

The conversation was balanced between my wife and my kids, and not controlled by one specific person. As each had questions, others supplemented with their responses and concerns. Although my instructions gave them liberty to pick any topic, they only focused on one topic. I never felt very much included, since the topic of gaming time was the focus. I’m the one who supervises their gaming time since I have the mobile app to supervise their Chromebooks, so I never felt excluded from the conversation. In fact, I remained very attentive since I was fighting the urge to verbally respond. This means that I had very little power in this conversation, because I was limited in conveying how I felt. As they had more to say, I felt I was losing power by not being able to respond in a complete way.

Of course, having a spoken language is a great communicative advantage. A culture that shares a spoken language has greater advantage over one that doesn’t. With spoken language one could convey more complex ideas. Take my trial in this experiment as an example. I was very limited in body language and face expressions. In my conversation alone, I was able to nod in agreement, raise my eyebrows to show interest, make eye contact, and use hand gestures. But those actions were insufficient to answer any questions or concerns that my family presented to me. The communication that I was able to demonstrate was just not enough to the group that was able to speak. If my family was representing a speaking culture, and I was representing a non-speaking one, there is a chance that I may eventually be excluded because I don’t posses the skills to speak their language. In the experiment it was easy to understand them, but if I truly did not posses a language skill, I am sure it would be the equivalent of listening to a group speak a foreign language. This is exactly how we could compare the difference in a modern scenario; where you have two different groups that speak completely different languages. If we present two groups that speaks different languages, the only way that they will be able to understand each other is by using body language and gestures, and even that will bear minimal communication between the two.

As we continued with our experiment, it was my turn to speak to my family. Finally, I could address their concerns. I started out by speaking and using hand gestures, which I immediately realized I was not allowed to do. This is where it became difficult, because when I speak, I use a lot of hand movement to emphasize on things. So, having to speak without showing any emotion, hand gestures, face expressions, or head movement felt like I was not getting my point across. I had to make sure I spoke in a monotone voice throughout the entire time, because I was not allowed to alter the tone of voice. This is especially difficult when one tries to emphasize words. I answered all the questions and concerns that my family had from the first part of this experiment. I was finally able to word everything I wanted to say, but it felt extremely different due to the restrictions we had. Once we finished the second trial, I asked what they thought of the way I spoke and my non-movements. My wife immediately said I was extremely boring, and my kids thought I was resembling a statue-like posture. They also felt that my acknowledgements to their concerns seemed ingenuine and somewhat careless. They understood everything I was saying, but because I sounded so bland, they were under the impression that I was not being honest. But my intentions were to communicate my response to their concerns, but the way I sounded and the way I was sitting presented an inorganic feeling.

This part of the experiment shows how important body language and tone of voice is. The ability to speak a language is a powerful way to communicate and using body language and tone of voice only emphasizes this way of communication. Body language could help emphasize a word, a sentence and overall a message. It helps convey genuineness, importance and emphasis. In my experiment that’s exactly what the absence of body language revealed; lack of honesty on what I spoke. That is the information that my family realized was missing when I spoke to them when addressing their concerns of our conversation.

Possessing the ability to read body language is an adaptive benefit, and it is important when intaking information. Body language expresses many things like danger which can be shown through facial features. There could be instances where if we are not able to speak, our face expression could communicate danger and fear. These facial features could help communicate the urgency to survive in a scenario where they are in danger. Body language is something the eye observes, and our brain interprets. There must be certain individuals that cannot interpret body language, just as others can’t understand a foreign language. And as important as body language could be, there are scenarios where we cannot observe body language when listening to someone talking. A certain scenario might be someone speaking through audio alone, with no visual. This would be an example of not reading someone’s body language and solely relying on the information they are verbally providing. This could be listening to the news or an audio podcast on any given topic. The information is there being passed on, but we could not visually see the body language or gestures that would accompany the information. In this case the information is solely based on the verbal information.