Week 2: Linguistic Phase

Language, it is said, is “the jewel in the crown of cognition.” (Pinker, 1990) With it's assistance, we have reasoned and innovated. More importantly, we found a way to inscribe and immortalize our inventions - passing them on to generations in the future. It is this linguistic faculty that is of focus in this week of observation – our ability to read and write language.

This week was going to be better , I told myself. Coming into the second week of observation, I found myself in anticipation of the increased freedom that written linguistic communication would afford me in effective social interaction, and to an extent this was true – with my notebook in hand, conversation came with much more ease than during the first week (if even that could be called 'conversation'). But the improvement was only marginal – more so than before, I found myself wanting to communicate but unable to do so with sufficient speed – to exchange at the speed of a vocal communicator was to condemn my writing to a sloppy and infuriatingly truncated mess. In truth, nothing could have prepared my mind, or my hand, for such an assailing feeling of communicative inadequacy.

In my ways, however, such feelings helped to better illuminate the advantages of verbally articulated linguistics. Just as written linguistics dominates emotion in its communicative accuracy, so does articulation rule over written language in its speed, ease of use, and versatility. Spoken language has many advantageous characteristics, and in a true naturally selective style, has thus taken its preponderant position in our history and development. Through verbal language, we compare all other forms of linguistic communications, and in this way has colored our perceptions.

Such perceptions, as an unfortunate result, threaten to taint objective observational reasoning. The best data and observations would come from those with whom I conversed the most. With all of the data I received on a daily basis, how could I possibly weed out those who were the most talkative? The original frustration at the apparent lack of solutions was accentuated by its stark necessity. The wealth of conversational data I was collecting was of no use to me if I could not convert it into an analyzable and indiscreet format. Dilemmas, however, are seldom a match for a dedicated mind – a solution was quickly stamped out to assuage this problem with the assistance of my advisor. For one week, each of the individuals who wrote in my book were given a pen of a distinguished color clearly identifiable with its respective writer. (the pens were kept by me until they were used so as to prevent tampering or trading of pens.) Each of the “subjects' ” collective entries were subjected to a multitrial recording session that cataloged the average equivalent time it would take to verbally articulate. These average times were then added together, and the proportion of each relative to the total conversation time was calculated. These values, deemed the Collective Subject Conversation Score, were essentially statistical gradings by which the subjects were ordered. ^*

The highest value, belonging to Subject 1, exceeded 45 minutes of equivalent verbal linguistic conversation. Keep in mind that this was merely an observation of one week's time – 45 minutes of conversation is quite massive considering the tasking nature of our discourse. Such heavy concentrations of conversation suggest, at least amongst my more 'talkative' subjects, that writing offers some sort of intrinsic benefit over talking that so motivates these characters to continue to converse with me in such a seemingly inefficient manner^** One can only infer from such uncontrolled conditions – but strong inferences can nonetheless prove a valuable basis for further research.

*A Chi-Squared Test of Homogeneity affirmed the validity of the CSC scores of the observed subjects for Week 2 as an accurate representation of the averages overall CSC scores of the observed subjects of Week 2-Week 5.

** For a more comprehensive analysis on the subject of the intrinsic advantages of written over verbal language, see “Integrative Study – Subject Analysis 1”