Human Communication and its difference to animal communication

Humancommunicationisthefielddedicatedtounderstandinghow.odt

Home >Social Science homework help >Human Communication and its difference to animal communication

Human communication is the field dedicated to understanding how humans share and exchange knowledge and information. Human communication is grounded in cooperative and shared intentions.

The current study of human communication can be branched off into two major categories; rhetorical and relational. The focus of rhetorical communication is primarily on the study of influence; the art of rhetorical communication is based on the idea of persuasion. The relational approach examines communication from a transactional perspective; two or more people interact to reach an agreed perspective

Human communication can be subdivided into a variety of types:

Intrapersonal communication (communication with oneself)
Interpersonal communication (communication between two or more people)
- Nonverbal communication
- Speech
- Conversation
- Visual communication
- Writing
- Mail
- Mass media
- Telecommunication
Organizational communication (communication within organizations)
Mass communication
Group dynamics (communication within groups)
Cross-cultural communication (communication across cultures)

The difference between human and animal communication

Language is one of the major things that separate humans from animals. Language makes human communication intelligible between one another. However, it should be noted that other animals also communicate: Your cat may let you know when its hungry, ants use pheromones and sound to indicate social status and distress, bees dance to tell one another where to find honey, and chimpanzees can learn sign language.

Human communication is more advanced compared to animal communication. The table below shows the major difference between animal and human communication.

	Human	Animals
Duality of Patterning	Distinctive sounds, called phonemes, are arbitrary and have no meaning. But humans can string these sounds in an infinite number of ways to create meaning via words and sentences.	Other animals do not communicate by arranging arbitrary sounds, which limits the number of messages they can create.
Creativity	New words can be invented easily.	Animals have to evolve in order for their signs to change.
Displacement	Humans can talk about remote, abstract, or imaginary things that aren't happening in their immediate environments.	Animal communication is context driven—they react to stimuli, or indexes.
Interchangeability	Any gender of human can use the same languages.	Certain animal communications in the animal world can only be used by one gender of that animal.
Cultural Transmission	Humans acquire language culturally—words must be learned.	The way that animals communicate are biological, or inborn.
Arbitrariness	Human language is symbolic, using a set number of sounds (phonemes) and characters (alphabet), which allows ideas to be recorded and preserved.	Animal communication is not symbolic, so it cannot preserve ideas of the past.
Biology	On a purely biological level, the human voice box and tongue are very unique, and are required to make the sounds we recognize as language.	Other animals have different biological structures, which impact the way they make sounds.
Ambiguity	A word, or sign, can have several meanings.	Every sign has only one meaning.
Variety	Human language can arrange words into an infinite number of ideas, sometimes referred to as discrete infinity.	Animals only have a limited number of combinations they can use to communicate.