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Re: THEORY: Natural language change (was Re: Charlie and I)

From:Ed Heil <edheil@...>
Date:Wednesday, September 22, 1999, 3:10
Charles wrote:

> > > So, I'm talking about attachment ambiguities. > > > Punctuation and intonation help a whole lot. > > > > But, if intonation is so important to remove ambiguity, > > how do we manage to understand each other (for the most > > part) just fine here in this forum? > > Um, ... we don't, pardner.
I seem to remember reading about an experiment in which groups of people were provided with: 1. A transcription of a conversation. 2. A sound recording of the same conversation. 3. A videotape of the same conversation. There may have been a variation such as a videotape without sound, or something like that. I don't rememember. In any case, they then asked the readers/listeners/viewers a barrage of questions about what was communicated in the conversation, to determine how much information they had received. They noted differences between the different groups, assuming that by subtracting the verbal from the auditory they could figure out what was transmitted by non-verbal sound channels, and by subtracting the auditory from the visual they could determine what was transmitted by non-verbal visual channels. The researchers concluded that the vast majority of information actually transmitted was transmitted nonverbally -- visually, so that the sound-only group didn't get it, or audibly, so that the transcription-only group didn't get it. (I have no idea how they decided what questions to ask the people about the conversation, though, and it seems to me that's an important part of the experiment -- one could conceivably choose questions in such a way as to include or exclude greater or lesser amounts of the sorts of information transmitted by different channels.) ----------------------------------------------- Boxcars are pulling an Ed of sorts out of town. edheil@postmark.net -----------------------------------------------