Intrapersonal Communication

Different Voices, Different Minds

Donna R. Vocate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136601842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Intrapersonal communication is a relatively new phenomenon for communication study and still lacks the grounding of a sound theoretical base. The first to present a developed theory of this discipline, this book's goal is to provide graduate students and professionals with an organized point of departure for their research. The theoretical section begins with an intrapersonal communication theory derived from the sociogenetic views of George Herbert Mead and L.S. Vygotsky. This theory emphasizes social interaction, the developmental nature of mind, and the crucial role of speech in creating a self, a culture, and a mind which then interact in human intrapersonal communication. This section also provides the reader with a coherent interdisciplinary knowledge base taken from speech communication, biology, neurology, cultural psychology, anthropology, sociology, speech pathology, and linguistics. The integrated theoretical perspective that results makes the study compatible with communication scholarship focusing on the social, cultural, cognitive, or performance aspects of communication phenomena. The applications section examines neurophysiological/intrapersonal communication research methods and studies to date, together with specific applications of intrapersonal communication theory to childhood language acquisition, to the establishment of gender identities, and to intrapersonal competence. The final chapter presents pedagogical guidance on how we can influence intrapersonal competence and performance as well as commenting on the current state of this study and its future prospects. The editor's interstitial commentary facilitates access by readers wishing to constuct their own theory.

I Theoretical Foundations

The complexity of intrapersonal communication precludes the data-to-theory approach theorists might use with more discrete and easily observed phenomena. Instead, the intrapersonal theorist needs an a priori theory to guide him or her in selecting a research path through the maze of physiological, neurological, cultural, psychological, linguistic, social, and other possible data available for study. This section provides the guidance of such a general theory together with background information on: (a) the history of those biological structures that underlie intrapersonal processing; (b) the neurological structure and functioning of the human brain; and (c) the cultural mediation which expands the intrapersonal world to include the abstract as well as the physical. These theoretical foundations provide a base from which the intrapersonal theorist may construct his or her own perspective and express it in subsequent theory.

Chapter 1. The attributes of intrapersonal communication or any other phenomenon are dependent on the subjective, metatheoretical decisions of the theorist. Rhetoric has come close to a consensual definition because its attributes have been a topic of scholarship for approximately 2,000 years. In contrast, confusion and ambiguity still prevail over what constitutes intrapersonal communication because it is a new area of study for speech communication.

In chapter 1, Vocate seeks precision by delimiting intrapersonal communication to uniquely human activities—self-talk and inner speech. These processes are identified using the tenets of Vygotsky and Mead—that any human activity is dynamic, developmental, and emerges from the interaction of biological and social forces in the individual, with speech playing a major role in creating a mindful self.

Chapter 2. The dual influences of nature and nurture are problematic for any theorist attempting to explain human behavior. The biology-mind conundrum is exacerbated for intrapersonal theorists because inner speech and self-talk are relatively inaccessible to observation. In this chapter, Riccillo presents the phylogenetic heritage of the biological structures necessary for intrapersonal communication to occur; and resolves the mind-body dualism problem facing theorists by endorsing Pribram’s neural monism—a position that mind and body exist in the same relationship as matter and energy (i.e., one entity can transform into the other so neither is dominant).

The importance of a biological perspective to a comprehensive understanding of intrapersonal communication is emphasized throughout chapter 2, and illustrated by Watterson and Riccillo’s research with newborn infants.

Chapter 3. The previous chapter considered biological influences on the development of intrapersonal communication in the human race. In this chapter, Ramsberger explains how the individual’s neurological functioning either makes talk possible or impedes it.

No realistic prediction/understanding with respect to the coding or dialogic processes of inner speech can occur until the theorist comprehends the hard-wiring that underlies its functioning. Ramsberger’s consideration of the pathologies of talk clarifies the effects of disconnects in its neurological base. The relationship between intrapersonal communication and brain functioning, however, is still far from being completely clear. Her report on the inner speech experience of a recovered aphasic raises some intriguing questions for the intrapersonal theorist with respect to the neurological bases of inner speech’s coding and dialogue processes.

Chapter 4. Understanding culture and its role in intrapersonal communication is crucial to developing a viable intrapersonal theory. In chapter 4, Cole maintains that the traditional conceptualizations of culture in cognitive psychology are inadequate for the task. Accepting the view of cultural-historical theorists that artifacts mediate between humans and direct experience. Cole emphasizes that the dual nature of artifacts (natural and cultural) expands human consciousness to include the concrete and the abstract simultaneously.

The units of culture that inhere in human thought are identified as cultural schemas. These schemas provide some structuration to one’s interpretation and action, but because they are always incomplete, they cannot determine thought in a causal fashion. Similarly, context is presented as the dynamic here-and-now activity of people engaged in constituting a particular context. The result of these views is that neither culture nor context are independent environments in which humans function, but rather exist as intrinsic components of humanness. We are, in short, so permeated by culture that any person’s thought/action exemplifies the weaving together of individual biology and societal culture into a unique occurrence in a given moment. This means that the intrapersonal theorist is always a participant-observer in his or her consideration of cultural influences rather than an independent experimenter manipulating extrinsic variables.

1	Self-Talk and Inner Speech: Understanding the Uniquely Human Aspects of Intrapersonal Communication

Donna R. Vocate

University of Colorado at Boulder

Talk creates, sustains, and governs the human world. It is talk that breathes life into language and gives it voice. Talk transmits the culture and embodies it in each of us. The voices of parents, grandparents, and significant others in our lives talked us into being and continue to speak to us. Our own voices are raised in an exultation of life beginning at birth. Upon gaining control of our voices, we attempt to influence others and to guide ourselves through the symbolic world we inhabit as humans. We hear the voices of others comforting, chastising, and attempting to persuade us from infancy onward; it is talk that shapes and defines human lives from beginning to end.

The talk created by voice enables us to perceive both self and other, and to conceive of subjective and objective experience. Talk has such power because the spoken word allows us to experience the contrast between internal and external feeling, between speaking the word and hearing it spoken. This is the sensation that Langer (1972) so eruditely argued gives rise to consciousness, and that Dance (1979) envisioned as the rudimentary beginning of human conceptualization. The mechanism permitting the perception of this significant contrast and all future ones, the human brain, is uniquely wired both to produce and to comprehend the spoken word (Luria, 1973). Yet, the sensation and the wiring are not sufficient for a mindful self. The catalyst of symbolic interaction is also necessary. It is talk that permits the dialectic between individual and society that gives a unique mind to each of us. As Langer noted, “It is in society, and more particularly in the verbal intercourse called conversation, that men have acquired what the most intelligent other animals have never developed—intellect” (1972, p. 355).

This essay, in presenting a theoretical paradigm for intrapersonal communication, explores a particular type of talk—self-talk, that is commonly referred to as intrapersonal communication. It is engendered by symbolic interaction and arises from a mental foundation of inner speech. The concepts of intrapersonal communcation and inner speech are frequently confused and not easily distinguished, so a consideration of both is mandated to clarify an understanding of either. A succinct way of previewing their basic distinction is to note that intrapersonal is one level or context of speech communication performance and that inner speech is the competence that makes possible all levels of performance although it occurs at the intrapersonal level.

This theoretical perspective on self-talk and inner speech draws heavily on the symbolic interactionist theory of George Herbert Mead as well as the sociocultural theory articulated by L. S. Vygotsky and A. R. Luria. These geographically divergent theories share the view that society and speech have important roles in individual development. Though Mead and Vygotsky evidently were not familiar with each other’s work, they did share an intellectual heritage grounded in the sociogenetic tradition originated by Baldwin and Royce in the late 1800s. Thus, both Mead and Vygotsky emphasized “the dynamic, dialectical nature of the self in its social context” (Valsiner & Van der Veer, 1988, p. 130). The sociogenetic perspective had two basic tenets: that human cognition is inherently social; and that human cognition develops as external social interactions are internalized.

Valsiner and Van der Veer (1988) adduced that Royce had a direct influence on Mead and that his “I” and “Me” were a version of Royce’s social opposition of “Ego” and “non-Ego.” Similarly, Baldwin’s ideas about imitation, feedback, and internalization shaped the thought of Pierre Janet, a major resource for Vygotsky (Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1988). In addition, many of the commonalties in the theories of Mead and Vygotsky can be traced to their intense study of the writings of Hegel. For example, Hegel’s “view that without interpersonal interaction there would be no self and no self-consciousness” (Van Der Veer, 1987a, p. 91) became a common axiom for both. Pragmatism’s influence on Mead, and Marxism’s influence on Vygotsky also served to intensify the effect of the German philosopher through indirect means (Van Der Veer, 1987a). The combination of principles derived from Hegel and the sociogenetic theorists thus made the theories of Mead and Vygotsky compatible despite their mutual ignorance of each other’s work. Language differences accounted for their lack of knowledge in part, but time and distance were also factors—Mead had been an active scholar for some three decades in Chicago before Vygotsky even emerged on Moscow’s psychological scene in the early 1920s (Valsiner & Van der Veer, 1988).

My discussion commences with a consideration of intrapersonal as a level of speech communication and as a phenomenon; and then moves to the phenomenon of self-talk—its definition, development, purposes, and functions. That is followed by a discussion of inner speech that operationally embodies internal self-talk as well as the coding process that creates and sustains all human talk. The essay concludes with the argument that a focus on these processes would coordinate future intrapersonal theory construction and research as well as inform other areas of the field such as interpersonal competency. The conclusion also provides a summary of the salient differences between the intrapersonal level spoken language processes of dialogue (self-talk) and coding (inner speech).

Definition of Intrapersonal Communication

Communication can be considered a ubiquitous process. If it is viewed as the transmission of stimuli and a response or action upon the same, then literally everything alive communicates—earthworms, elm trees, mold spores, squirrels, and so forth. The often quoted axiom from Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967) that “one cannot not communicate” (p. 51) illustrates the inclusiveness of that definition. Such a view, however, extends our scope to absurd proportions and provides no insight into human communication. It is my position that human communication is unique for two reasons: (a) human speech and (b) the symbolic process made possible by language. These two phenomena are united in the concept of spoken language, which Dance (1990) defined as “the fusion of genetically determined speech with culturally determined language” (p. 2). This fusion, to which I have referred by the more colloquial label “talk,” delineates the unique means by which humans act upon information and thus differentiates specifically human communication from communication processes that we share with other life forms.

Intrapersonal as a Level

Our academic consideration of human communication typically portrays it as occurring on three levels categorized by the number of communicators involved—intrapersonal, interpersonal, and public communication. The research and focus of communication scholars to date, however, have been almost exclusively on the latter two. Frequently, a consequence of this has been that intrapersonal communication is equated with the intrapersonal level and identified simply as communication involving a single communicator, with no further explanation offered. These levels identify contexts but provide no substantive information about the nature of the communication that occurs in each tier. Thus, the intrapersonal level definition refers to a setting in which the communicator is both sender and receiver, but it fails to differentiate between human communication in this context and the communication of a single elm tree biologically responding to an insect invasion.

Intrapersonal as a Phenomenon

In reviewing the various published definitions of intrapersonal, Cunningham (1989) declared it critical to stop and take stock of our treatment of the phenomenon because we had failed thus far to clearly define it. Roberts, Edwards, and Barker (1987) pushed for specificity by defining intrapersonal as “all of the physiological and psychological processing of messages that happens within individuals at conscious and nonconscious levels as they attempt to understand themselves and their environment” (p. 2). This was a beginning, yet it excluded overt self-talk, which, given current definitions, cannot be assigned to another level of processing. It also set up too broad a domain because it conflated all internal processing into an amorphous mass of organismic and human functioning, making any systematic examination problematic, if not impossible, and building a dualism of the ideal and the material into the phenomenon of intrapersonal communication.

As noted previously, some of the confusion results from using the same term, intrapersonal, to refer to a level of processing as well as to the process itself. As a level of human communication, intrapersonal merely identifies a context, one in which a single human communicator is both the source and the object of interaction. Thus, a reflexive utterance such as “ouch,” and an intentional, syntactically complete sentence such as “How could I be so stupid?” could both be assigned to intrapersonal although their differences have precipitated some convoluted discussions of “mindful” and “mindless” communication (Chautauqua, 1992). Organismic communication, of course, also occurs on the intrapersonal level, such as when proprioceptive nerve cells transmit the information to the brain that one’s stomach is filled. Such data, however, do not become symbolic components in human communication until the interpretive process has attached meaning to them.

It is my interpretation that defining the phenomenon of intrapersonal communication as the transmission of stimuli and action upon the same in a single human organism may be taxonomically correct in a very general sense (Dance, 1990), but it places speech communication scholars who wish to study intrapersonal in the unfortunate position of either examining cellular transmissions or maintaining that our theoretical focus includes attributes and processes that we are unprepared to examine because we are not biologists. Therefore, as theorists, we must necessarily be more precise in identifying the intrapersonal phenomena being considered by us as central to speech communication. Consequently, I have excluded organismic functioning from my consideration of self-talk and inner speech; although in later chapters Riccillo and Ramsberger make it clear that the abstract process of human symbolizing and the resultant human dialogue exist only because of the functioning of relevant physiological underpinnings.

Self-Talk as a Phenomenon

Earlier, I equated the terms talk and spoken language using Dance’s definition of the latter as “the fusion of genetically determined speech with culturally determined language” (1990. p. 2). I now wish to differentiate between the two because differences, albeit relatively minor ones, do exist. Dance (chapter 9, this volume) talks about the forms of spoken language, identifying two: external and internal. In his schema, the external and internal forms of spoken language can each occur on the intrapersonal level. I find it helpful to add a consideration of purpose and function to Dance’s lucid taxonomic structure of form. For clarity and specificity, I am separating the occurrence of spoken language on the intrapersonal level into two operationally distinct phenomena: (a) a dialogue with the self, or self-talk, which may be internal or external, and (b) a process of coding thought into language or decoding perceived language into meaning, which is one of the functions of inner speech.

Self-talk and inner speech are both spoken language phenomena occurring at the intrapersonal level. They differ, however, in both form and function. Self-talk can be either overt or covert, so it is both external and internal in form; inner speech is only internal by all definitions. Consequently, self-talk is a phenomenon embodying the contrast between internal and external existence, similar to the initial perception of contrast on a purely vocal level that Dance (1979) and Yingling (chapter 6 this volume) assert eventually gives rise to consciousness. It also entails a semantic dialectic between s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part I: Theoretical Foundations
• Part II: Practical Applications
• Part III: Capstone Forming the Future
• Author Index
• Subject Index