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Communication Overview

• Communication involves transferring information between individuals or groups and is at the core of social interaction
• Language consistes of a set of sounds(phonemes), structured into meaningful components (morphemes), organised according to sets of rules.
• Utterances are complete units of speech in spoken language

Rules of Language

• Semantic rules determine the meaning of sounds and words to define utterances.
• Grammar encompasses morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules for language production and comprehension.
• The rules of language ensure meaningful communication.

Pragmatics

• Pragmatics distinguishes between the literal meaning of words and the speaker's intended meaning.
• Speech Act Theory by Austin (1962) describes language as "performative," enabling people to achieve actions.
• The ability to differentiate between literal and intended allows the actions performed by speech to be determined.
• People can understand the intended meaning of a message
• Locution refers to the non-ambiguous or literal meaning of an utterance
• Illocution is the speech act performed by the utterance
• Perlocution refers to the unintended effects of an utterance
• Indirect language (Searle, 1975) is when intended meaning is implied rather than explicitly stated, yet commonly understood.
• The Cooperative Principle from Grice (1975) explores how people communicate effectively relying on certain rules within conversational implicature.

Grice's Maxims of Communication

• Quantity means contributions to a conversation are the "right amount" of informative as required.
• Quality means communicators genuinely attempt to make contributions that are true and without falsehood.
• Relation means communicators aim to only say things that are relevant.
• Manner means communicators aim to be clear and straightforward and avoid ambiguity.

Politeness

• Politeness involves framing conversations to save face, maintaining a positive sense of how one is viewed.
• Face is people's concern about their value or standing in the eyes of others
• Positive face is a person's desire to be well thought of; to be understood, liked, and treated nicely.
• Threats to face are unpleasant which leads to orientating utterances to save both positive and negative face of the people who are being interacted with.
• Negative face refers to a person's desire to not be bothered, and to go about one's business unimpeded.

Language and Cognition

• Language shapes thought patterns on which actions are based
• Language significantly shapes people's thoughts and behaviors.
• Cultural frame switching arises because languages are learned in different cultural settings, different knowledge structures are learned and this influences thought.
• Example: In bilingual studies, Spanish and English speakers tested on the Big Five Test showed higher extraversion scores in English, while Chinese and English speakers were more collectivistic in Chinese and more individualistic in English.
• Saying is believing effect is the tendency for what is said about individuals, groups, or events to influence memory.
• Describing a person or group to an audience impacts the memory of that entity; negative descriptions can lead to negative associations and subsequent recall.
• Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB) assumes behavioural events are described at different abstraction levels like concrete verbs or abstract nouns.
• Increasing abstraction reduces information about the situation, emphasizing characteristics of the person involved. -LIB is the tendency to describe ingroup positive and outgroup negative behaviour abstractly, but the reverse concretely.
• Linguistic Expectancy Bias is an interpersonal form of LIB, where expected behaviors are described abstractly and unexpected behaviors concretely.

Identity

• Matched guise technique is used to measure attitudes based on speaker's language.
• Language use provides clues to a person's social status via accent.
• Accent indicates social status, perceived class variations occur across cultural contexts, and variations are ordered in prestige.
• Received Pronunciation is standard, high status spoken accent.
• Accents deviating from RP are evaluated less favorably.
• Social markers are features of language use that convey information about the speaker's characteristics

Speech Accomodation Theory

• People adjust their speech style in conversations
• Speech convergence shifts style towards the listener, while speech divergence shifts away.
• People modify their speech style and non-verbal behaviors in conversations to suit the context.
• Motives include wanting to be understood and be liked by the communication partner

Gender

• Differences in speech patterns relate to gender identity.
• Significant vocal pitch variances exist between male and female speakers.
• Socially, it's more desirable for men to have a "deeper" voice.
• Japanise studies of women's voices have dropped in recent years, as the social status of women has changed

Stereotyping

• Language communicates thoughts about others through explicit statements or indirect stereotypes.
• The serial transmission experiment (Lyons & Kashima, 2003) demonstrates that stereotype-inconsistent information diminishes, while consistent information persists through communication chains.

Nonverbal Communication

• Nonverbal communication conveys messages without words.
• Social intellect involves skills to infer emotions, motives, and personality.
• Co-verbal behaviors accompany speech to convey information.
• Nonverbal behaviour helps to express intimacy, establish dominance, facilitate goal achievement, regulate conversation, and provide information about thoughts and feelings.

Touch

• Heslin and Patterson (1982) classify touch into five types: Professional/Functional, Social/Polite, Friendship/Warmth, Love and Intimacy, and Sexual.
• Hall (1966; 1984) observed four zones of interpersonal distances which were Intimate(up to 0.5 m), Personal(0.5-1m), Social(1-4m), and Public(4m)
• Facial expressions are voluntary or involuntary changes that convey information.
• Display rules dictate appropriateness of emotional expression.
• Gestures are hand and arm movements accompanying talk: emblems replace it.
• Gaze refers to looking at another person's eyes; people spend two-thirds of their time looking at the other person
• Eye contact is when two people are looking at each other at the same time.

Nonverbal Communication

• Argyle and Dean (1965) found people reach and maintain equilibrium by responding in compensatory ways to maintain equilibrium.
• There is evidence for how nonverbal behaviours influence others
• Listener cues influence subsequent language use, according to Buekeboom.
• Nonverbal sensitivity involves discerning thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
• Nonverbal sensitivity improves with age and experience,

Deception

• Motivational impairment effect: when attempts to conceal deceit actually make it more detectable.

Conversation and Discourse

• Conversations involve verbal and nonverbal interactions.
• Back-channel communication indicates active listening.
• Conversation analysis studies the structure and patterns of talk.
• Discourse analysis examines phenomena in social psychology like emotions, prejudice, crowds, and protests.

Computer Mediated Communication

• Communication has been revolutionized by internet technologies via Computer-Mediated Communication(CMC)
• Anonymity facilitates deindividuation where people do not see themselves as individuals.
• Deindividuation explains higher disclosure and hostile (trolling) behaviors.
• Extremists take the opportunity to use and disseminate propaganda and recruit members.
• Online platforms also enable cyberbullying, stalking, stalking and other harassment.
• The extremist usage is radicalisation of opinion and behaviour, recruitment, and fundraising.