Non-verbal Communication and Language

Abstract

Human communication consists of an intricate combination of verbal and non-verbal signals. We shall see that the verbal aspects of messages are elaborated and supported in a number of ways by non-verbal ones. In order to understand human verbal communication we need to know about these non-verbal components. Non-verbal communication (NVC) can be studied experimentally as a problem in encoding and decoding; it can also be studied as part of a sequence, using the methods of ethology or of linguistics. We shall see that this kind of analysis has theoretical implications about the nature of human communication, and has practical implications in a number of fields.