Actions Speak Louder in Words

[Poll_Blind]

From Science.com:

If you've ever tried to speak to someone who doesn't share your native tongue, you could probably intuit a bit of what they were saying just by how they said it. Anger, happiness, and even confusion traverse the language barrier quite well. Now a new study shows that emotions aren't the only information that piggybacks on our speech: We subconsciously convey important details about the objects around us just by verbally describing them.

Language is largely symbolic--most of the time we use our words to convey ideas. But how we say something can be as important as what we say: "Hey man, nice car!" spoken with enthusiasm carries a much different connotation than when spoken with sarcasm. But can we communicate other information with our speech patterns, such as where the car is or where it's going?

To find out, psychologist Howard Nusbaum and colleagues at the University of Chicago asked 24 college students to describe a dot moving across a screen. The students were told to use one of two sentences: "It is going up" or "It is going down." The team found that when students described the dots going up, the pitch of their voice was, on average, 6 hertz higher than that of those describing the dot going down. The same thing happened when another 24 students read the sentences from a computer screen, indicating people change the sound of their voice according to directional information contained within words. In another experiment, the researchers changed the speed of the dots; they found that, when describing the dots, the students spoke faster when the dots moved faster.

But do listeners pick up on these verbal cues? The team tested this by having volunteers listen to recordings of the students who participated in the dot speed experiment. The volunteers accurately predicted whether the dot was moving fast or slow 63% of the time, indicating they were gathering information about the dots' velocity from the speed at which the sentence was spoken. Changing the speed or pitch of a word may be analogous to hand gestures (holding your hand at hip's height to indicate how tall a kid is, for example), says Nusbaum, who refers to the voice modulation as "spoken gestures." The team reports its results in the August issue of the Journal of Memory and Language.

--snip--

PB

[Monkeyman]

1. Yes my son came home with two people who spoke German only

We had a great time just by making and pointing to items.

[Poll_Blind]

2. Heh heh, I've been there too! One day two Germans on a tour of...

...America showed up at my door, unannounced and only one of them spoke very halting English. I soon discovered the female in the couple was a pen-pal with my then-girlfriend. I invited them in and we did the point game- it was very entertaining and it relaxed us both while we waiting for my GF to come home.

  Was especially fun because the guy...spoke almost NO English whatsoever but became extremely animated when he saw the small computer center in my house where pretty much 5-6 computers hum softly doing their thing. He asked to use the Internet and I said yes- turned out he was not only a computer user but the SQL (a database) manager for a chain of German banks. We spoke in computer-ese the rest of the evening, like speaking latin among two scientists who otherwise do not know each other's language.

Cheers!

PB

[Occulus]

3. I think I'll throw a big ol' donkey-toothed

DUUUUHH!

at this.

Come on. How completely obvious can anything get?

Was there actually research money allocated by someone- anyone- for this, that could honestly have been used elsewhere? Talk about examples of unnecessary science...

I mean, geez.... this is so...... obvious...

It's called body language...

[Wilms]

4. My dog could have told them this.

:D

[Occulus]

5. My cat is SHOWING me this.

Right. Now.

(edit: He wants to play. Right. NOW. Dammit.)

[Igel]

6. Kind of interesting findings.

Knocks some kinds of modularity on their heads, and raises other questions.

But if it only seems reasonable, it's because the argumentation isn't known, the theories that are the background aren't known, and it's because the difference between statistically significant findings and anecdotal confirmation of what we believe isn't pertinent.