The Psychology of Language and Communication

Geoffrey Beattie, Andrew W Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351739368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is a classic edition of Geoffrey Beattie's and Andrew Ellis' influential introduction to the psychology of human language and communication, now including a new reflective introduction from the authors. Drawing on elements from many sub-disciplines, including cognitive and social psychology, psycholinguistics and neuropsychology, the book offers an approach which breaches conventional disciplinary boundaries. Exploring the diverse nature of communication, Beattie and Ellis focus on the range of human communicative channels and the variations which occur both between and within societies and cultures.

Written from an informative and entertaining historical perspective, The Psychology of Language and Communication remains a key resource for anyone interested in the psychology of communication, language and linguistics, 30 years on from its first publication.

1
The Nature of Communication

Humpback whales, those large and, if the truth be known, none too beautiful creatures (at least when seen through our eyes), spend their summers feeding on small crustaceans and fish in the polar waters. They migrate to tropical waters for winter and spring, scarcely feeding at all. During the winter and spring they mate, give birth and sing – a long, complex, haunting song which can last for over twenty minutes before being repeated in its entirety. The song changes gradually through the season and may be quite different at the end of the spring from the beginning of winter.

Why do whales sing? Biologists are loath to conclude that they do so because they get bored just swimming around all day; instead the scientific mind looks for a function and evolutionary purpose to the song. Singing only happens in the breeding season, and most singing humpbacks are males. Female humpbacks approach singing males, apparently using the song as a means of selecting a mate, while males often avoid singers. Thus, while one might prefer to think that the whales’ songs relate epic battles with whalers in days of yore, it is more likely that they function to make the whales aware of each other’s location, attract females to males and keep rivals spaced apart. The song may be ornate for the same reason that the peacock’s tail is ornate and the dress of disco-goers is ornate – all the better to attract a partner (Tyack, 1981).

Communication is widespread throughout the animal kingdom (see Sebeok, 1977). Though we shall be concerned in most of this book with human communication, a brief survey of a few examples of communication in other species will help establish our concern with the natural uses and functions of communication, and will allow us to make some general observations regarding the nature of communication which will inform our discussion of human communication in later chapters.

Of fish, chimps and bees: communication in the natural world

As the breeding season approaches, the male three-spined stickleback builds a tunnel-like nest of reeds or grasses at the bottom of its pond. When the nest is completed, this small fish performs an elegant ‘zig-zag dance’, spiralling up and down, to attract a mate. The dance communicates to any nearby female that this is a male who has done the necessary preparation and is ready to become a father. If a receptive female is attracted by the dance, the two swim together with the male butting the female’s abdomen to stimulate egg laying. The eggs are laid in the nest by the female and are fertilized by the male who then guards the nest, fanning the eggs to keep them aerated until the eggs hatch. The female plays no further part in rearing the young once she has laid the eggs (Tinbergen, 1951).

When a scouting honeybee discovers a new source of food some distance from the hive, it communicates the location of the new source in another much studied way – the remarkable ‘waggle dance’. Von Frisch (1967) describes the dance as follows:

In the typical tail-wagging dance the bee runs straight ahead for a short distance, returns in a semicircle to the starting point, again runs through the straight stretch, describes a semicircle in the opposite direction, and so on in regular alternation. The straight part of the run is given particular emphasis by a vigorous wagging of the body.

Research by von Frisch and others (see Holldobler, 1977) has shown that the duration of the straight run, during which the dancer waggles and emits a buzzing sound, communicates to nearby bees the distance of the food source (probably measured as the amount of energy required to fly to the source). The angle of the straight run relative to the sun (or gravity) indicates the direction of the source. A vertical dance on the honeycomb means that the food is in the direction of the sun, while an angled dance communicates the angle away from the sun that foraging bees must fly. Clearly the evolution of this dance has brought enormous benefits to the bees in terms of more efficient food gathering.

As a final example of communication in the natural world we might look briefly at communication among our nearest relatives, the monkeys and apes. Seyfarth, Cheney and Marler (1980) studied a colony of vervet monkeys, and found that they give different alarm calls to different predators. There is one call given when an eagle is spotted, another for a snake, and a third for a leopard. If recordings of these alarms are played back to the monkeys, the eagle alarm call causes the monkeys to look up, the leopard call causes them to run into the trees, and the snake call causes them to look downwards – this all in the absence of any of the three predators. Infant monkeys apparently have to learn these different calls and ‘overgeneralize’ initially in the way young children do, making eagle calls to many different birds, leopard calls to a variety of mammals, and snake calls to various different long, thin objects.

Chimpanzees in the wild display a wide repertoire of communicative signals, including a range of calls and facial expressions (van Lawick-Goodall, 1971; Marler and Tenaza, 1977). Each signal communicates something of the internal state of the sender. A soft, barking noise indicates annoyance or mild aggressiveness toward another individual, while a ‘grin’ with the mouth closed or only slightly open indicates submission or fright. Again, communication benefits the apes by regulating their social interaction and by relaying information about events in the external world to other members of the group.

A working definition of communication and some comments

What do all these examples have in common that qualifies them to be grouped together as acts involving communication? Can we capture those common features in a working definition of communication? All of these acts clearly involve the transmission of a signal from one organism to another. The signal carries information from a transmitter organism to a receiver organism. Having decoded the signal, the receiver is now in the position to make an appropriate response should one be required.

Drawing all of these threads together we can formulate a working definition of communication which asserts that communication occurs when one organism (the transmitter) encodes information into a signal which passes to another organism (the receiver) which decodes the signal and is capable of responding appropriately.

In terms of some of our earlier examples, a bee returning to the hive transmits information about the direction and distance of a food source by encoding that information in a signal (the waggle dance) which other bees can receive, decode and act appropriately upon. Similarly a vervet monkey can transmit information about the identity of a threatening predator by selecting the appropriate call from among its repertoire. That encoded signal can then be received and decoded by other monkeys who, again, can now take appropriate (evasive) action.

Any communicative act, whether by animal or human, can be analyzed in terms of:

1. A transmitter who encodes information into a signal;
2. The physical transmission of a signal; and
3. A receiver who decodes the signal to recover the information encoded by the transmitter.

Failures of communication may also be analyzed in these terms; that is, in terms of faulty encoding, faulty transmission or faulty decoding. Faulty encoding may occur because you make an inadvertent slip of the tongue, or cannot remember the name of someone you want to mention in the discussion. Faulty transmission may be caused by a bad telephone line or by a low flying aeroplane drowning the sound of your voice. A misreading or mishearing would be an example of faulty decoding, as in the case reported by Rolfe (1972) of the depressed first officer on a plane who, when his captain said ‘cheer up’ as the plane raced along the runway, misheard the signal as ‘gear up’ and promptly raised the undercarriage!

A final category of communication failure involves some form of mismatch between the encoding processes of the transmitter and the decoding processes of the receiver. If I talk in an accent or dialect you find hard to understand, the fault does not lie in me or in you but in the mismatch between us. Similarly, when English or American tourists give the ‘thumbs up’ gesture to a Sardinian or a Greek they cannot really be blamed for not knowing that in Sardinia and Greece the gesture is a sexual insult (Morris, Collett, Marsh and O’Shaughnessy, 1979). At a higher level, if a teacher talks over your head, or if a conversation breaks down because a speaker assumes certain knowledge on the part of the listener which he or she in fact does not possess, then who is to say whether the blame lies with the encoder or the decoder? In conversation we naturally assume that the listener shares much of our knowledge of the world, and that much can accordingly go unspoken. If we are talking to a child, or a foreigner, or someone who is not an ardent football fan, then we know we must be careful in what knowledge we take for granted, but it is not surprising that a performance as complex and delicate as holding a conversation should occasionally run aground through one or other of the sources of communication failure that we have just outlined.

Returning to our definition of communication, there are a number of further points and comments we wish to make. We shall take them one at a time.

Comment 1. Communication is a fuzzy concept

Few if any of the concepts humans operate with are clearly bounded such that we can always say confidently, ‘This is an x’ or ‘This is not an x’. Take the homely concept ‘item of furniture’. A chair is clearly an item of furniture, and so is a table. But how about a radio? Or an ashtray? An apple is clearly not an item of furniture, but it equally clearly is a ‘fruit’. A chair is not a fruit, but is a coconut? How about an olive? What all of this apparent sophistry goes to show is that most of the concepts we work with happily in everyday life are ‘fuzzy’ concepts whose boundaries are blurred and indistinct. Some instances are clearly members of the category defined by the concept, and others equally clearly do not qualify, but in the middle are awkward, halfway cases we are uncertain how to treat (Rosch, 1975, 1977). The anthropologist Mary Douglas has noted how natural objects which resist assimilation to everyday categories may become objects of superstition or taboo – like the hapless bat which, neither four-legged animal nor bird, is condemned to a twilight world of witches and vampires (Douglas, 1966).

We cannot reasonably expect the concept of ‘communication’ to be any less fuzzy than concepts like ‘fruit’ or ‘item of furniture’, and we therefore doubt the wisdom of trying to devise a watertight definition which will hold in all the instances we wish to retain, keep out all negative instances and brook no intermediates. Communication between men and machines, or between machines and machines, is an example of a borderline case for our particular definition. Can we be said to ‘communicate’ with computers, and can they reasonably be said to communicate with us? If computers communicate, do ‘Speak Your Weight’ machines? Or telephone answering machines? We have no strong position on such matters: fortunately all the instances of communication we shall discuss will involve living, metabolizing organisms, so our definition will suffice for our purposes.

Comment 2. A signal is an encoded message, and transmitting and receiving are acts of translation

A communicative signal, when successful, conveys information from transmitter to receiver. The information content of a signal we may call the message. The message is in the signal, but only in the sense that it is recoverable from the signal by a suitably equipped receiver. A communicative signal carries its message in code. The requirement that a signal should cross space or time means that we and other organisms must entrust our emotions, feelings and thoughts to a physical code like a sound wave if we are ever to make others aware of them.

Comment 3. The same message may be communicated in more than one way

Humans have undoubtedly developed the art of communication further than any other species if only in the number of different ‘channels’ of communication employed. Facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, body posture, clothing, speech and nonverbal sounds like laughter and sighs are just some of the channels which can communicate information between people. We shall see in later chapters that these channels are to some extent specialized for transmitting different sorts of information, but it is also the case that the same information may often be successfully transmitted along a variety of different channels. Thus a nod of the head conveys the same message as saying ‘yes’, while a shrug means ‘I don’t know’.

The message is independent of the channel used to communicate it. We may choose one channel on one occasion and another on a different occasion (there is no point waving goodbye on the telephone, but a gesture may be preferable to words when trying to communicate with a foreigner). A third option is to exploit the safety in redundancy and use both channels simultaneously – nodding and saying ‘yes’ at the same time if you are particularly anxious that your message not be lost. Finally, a complex message may be split up and its parts transmitted along different channels to be reassembled by the receiver. We shall encounter plenty of examples of this last option later in the book.

Comment 4. A potentially available response is sufficient to define a communicative act

Our working definition of communication simply required that the receiver be ‘capable of responding appropriately’. Very often communication occurs without the receiver giving any overt indication that anything has happened. You, the reader, may at this moment be seated at a table, lying on the beach or curled up in an armchair in front of a blazing fire. Unless you are taking notes, nodding in agreement here and there, or maybe reading bits aloud, there will be nothing in your overt behaviour (ear scratching, leg crossing, mosquito swatting or whatever) to indicate that any communication is going on. Yet thanks to the invention of writing we (hopefully) are communicating information to you. Proof of that communication could be obtained by asking you questions based on what you have just read, or perhaps by presenting a sentence which you must categorize as having been in the text or not. Such techniques are the mainstay of psychologists wishing to understand the process of language comprehension, and we shall see some examples of their use in Chapter 13.

It may be unsatisfying to some to have to build into our definition the fact that the receiver need only be capable of a potential response which may never be realized, but it seems to us to be asking for trouble to adopt any other position. Indeed trouble arose when the school of psychology that called itself Behaviourism attempted to build a science based only on overt behaviour. This approach dominated psychology in the United States between about 1920 and 1960 before its inbuilt contradictions caught up with it and forced it to hand power over to the born-again cognitive psychology movement represented here.

Comment 5. Neither transmitter nor receiver need be consciously aware of the passage of a communicative signal

Fish communicate; snails communicate; even lowly slime moulds communicate; yet we feel that even the most ardent advocate of animal consciousness would be hard pressed to maintain that conscious awareness was involved in all of these cases. Psychologists of various persuasions have for a long time argued that communication can occur between people without one party or the other having any awareness that a coded signal has passed between them. Freud and psychoanalysts since have suggested that our gestures, pauses, slips and so on may communicate information about our unconscious thoughts and wishes; much theorizing in the field of nonverbal communication has been concerned about the possibility of unconscious ‘leakage’ of information; and cognitive psychologists have from time to time become excited about purported demonstrations of the ‘subliminal’ uptake of information from signals so weak as to be outside of awareness. We shall consider the evidence for these different claims later in the book, and also ask whether such phenomena, even if genuine, play any important part in our daily lives, but for now it is sufficient to note that nothing in our approach to communication requires that the transmitter and/or receiver be necessarily aware of the fact that communication has happened.

If we could talk to the animals

Dr Doolittle, in the film of the same name, enthuses about the possibility of being able to ‘talk to the animals’. This enthusiasm has also infected many philosophers and psychologists, and l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface to the first edition
• Introduction to the classic edition
• 1 The nature of communication
• 2 Channels of human communication
• 3 Kinesic channels of human communication
• 4 The language channel
• 5 Linguistic diversity: Babel and beyond
• 6 Variation within a language
• 7 The psycholinguistics of speaking
• 8 The stream of behaviour: co-ordinating verbal and nonverbal channels
• 9 Conversation as cooperative interaction
• 10 Conversational structure
• 11 Writing
• 12 Language reception: recognizing spoken and written words
• 13 Language comprehension and memory
• 14 The cognitive neuropsychology of language and communication
• 15 The development of language and communication
• References
• Author index
• Subject index