Understanding Human Communication: Key Concepts
Key Concepts in Human Communication
Sender, Message, Receiver, and Feedback
Code
- Competencies
- Communicative
- Ideological: “Do I want to challenge something if I consider it wrong or not? How do I talk about my ideological competition?”
- Cultural: “Do I challenge it or not, and do I adapt to the culture that surrounds me? These are my cultural competencies.”
- Discursive Restrictions: These indicate your domain over language tools. It’s about having the ability to communicate appropriately to the situation. For example, if two lawyer friends are on the street, they might greet each other casually, not with formal titles.
- Psychological Determinism: This refers to the adaptability of the sender or receiver with respect to their psychological behavior. For example, a six-year-old boy cannot participate in the same conversations as adults.
- Channel
- Context
Clarifications
- Psychological Determinism and Discursive Restrictions: The definitions in bold were dictated by the teacher. The rest, including the examples, were added for clarity. Try to create examples for all these concepts to ensure understanding.
- The ideological and cultural competencies were given by the teacher as non-communicative.
Levels of Communication
- Intrapersonal: Communication with yourself.
- Interpersonal: Communication with two or more participants in the same time and place. For example, chatting in a classroom. If you are chatting in the classroom with slips of paper, it would be “mediated interpersonal.”
- Institutional: Communication within an institution, which may be internal or external. In this case, we are talking about communication hierarchies and so on.
- Social: Mass media communication.
Human Communication
This is not the same as general communication. It is a phenomenon present only in humans. Humans can use “meta-communication,” which is “to speak about the same language.” We can speak of words, change the meaning of a message through intonation, inquire about a message, and understand things that are not explicitly stated (double meanings, sarcasm, exaggeration, etc.).
Signifier and Signified
- Signifier: The graphic representation of something that exists. For example, if I write “DOG,” the letters are signs that we adapt to our communication and have a meaning, which has no direct relationship to what I mean. If I write “dog,” someone who speaks the language understands the four-legged creature, but “dog” has nothing to do with the animal itself. It is an organized system of signs to which we give meaning.
- Signified: The meaning becomes “what the signifier represents.” For example, the signified of “dog” is a “four-legged animal that barks.”
Language
Language is something like the manner of speech, “Spanish language,” for example. Or the structure of speech.
Two Definitions of Language
- The ability to learn and use a language.
- Any human communication system based on certain conventions.
Speech
“When a subject in a given situation, dealing with an established intent, makes use of the language system, it produces an unprecedented speech that is called” – Textual, from Atorresi’s book.
Norm
“The language norm covers all that is custom and tradition of a community speaking a language, that is, everything that a community has chosen as its variety. The use of “vos” refers to the norm of the Spanish language in Argentina (a dialect), and the use of “tú” to the norm of peninsular Spanish.” The norm refers to the way of talking about a community, its expressions, and particular words. For example, “che, let’s go party, and we were coming here” is part of the norm of Argentine Spanish expressions.
Communication
Communication is a sharing of knowledge, thoughts, ideas, feelings, etc., that occurs between two or more individuals who may or may not share the same vocabulary, discursive restrictions, psychological assessments, or skills. It involves a sender, message, receiver, and feedback (except in mass communication).