Within the context of societal development, one aspect of human behavior has often been seen as having primary importance for human development and growth. That aspect, communication, has propelled humans through both technological and philosophical evolution, and is the way that society organizes itself on both the macro and micro levels.
Metaphorically speaking, language is really little more than an organized pattern of agreed upon sounds and rules. In actuality, it is much more than that. Language supplies the basic tenet of communication, but within human speech a multitude of communicative behaviors are possible using tone, speech patterns, idiomatic expressions, and phrasing. What is it that turns language into communication or more precisely, what is it about human communication that makes the process of communication so complex? This paper will examine five research studies on communication and comment on the strengths and weaknesses of each. In the context of the larger questions regarding the effective nature of communication, it will assess each study and comment on directions for further research.
For language to be translated into societal communication, it must be either communicated orally or by the written word. Under the rubric of speech communication, authors Gundersen and Hopper believe that effective speech communication is poorly understood and defined, especially by educators (158). Their study draws upon the literature on the special relationships between speech effectiveness and audience comprehension, but attempts to go much further by assessing a quantitative difference between speech delivery and speech effectiveness.
To develop a base paradigm for their study, the authors used eleven representative speech texts and four empirical studies in order to determine which behaviors were more effective. The behaviors were quantified and ranked and included volume, rate, quality, posture, gesture...