The Role of Culture in the Communication Process Cultural Influences on Verbal Language and Nonverbal Behavior Encoding and Decoding

• Main Authors: David Matsumoto, Jeffrey Leroux, Seung Hee Yoo
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: eskimo*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.459.3182; http://www.kwansei.ac.jp/s_sociology/attached/5288_44277_ref.pdf

Cultural groups are often characterized by distinct languages, and subcultures often have dialects within a language. Each is a unique symbol system that denotes what a culture deems important in its world. That words exist in some languages and not others reflects the fact that different cultures symbolize their worlds differently. For example, Whorf (1956) pointed out that Eskimo language had three words for snow while the English language had only one. The German word schadenfreude and the Japanese word amae, which do not exist in English, are other examples. Self-and other-referents differ across languages (Suzuki, 1978), as do counting systems. Linguistic differences in counting systems are thought to contribute to differences in math achievement between the U.S. and Asian countries (Stigler & Baranes, 1988). Culture not only affects language lexicons, but also its function or pragmatics. For example, Kashima and Kashima (1998) examined 39 languages and found that cultures whose languages allowed for pronouns to be dropped from sentences tended to be less individualistic, which they interpreted as reflecting different cultural conceptualizations of self and others. Gudykunst and his colleagues have shown that perceptions of personalization, synchrony, and difficulty in ingroup and outgroup communications differ according to meaningful dimensions of cultural variability (Gudykunst & Nishida, 1986; Gudykunst, Yoon, & Nishida, 1987). Culture, self-construals (i.e., self-concepts), and individual values affect communication styles across cultures (Gudykunst & Mody, 2001; Gudykunst et al., 1992; Kim et al., 1996). Cultural differences also exist in the use of apologies (Barnlund & Yoshioka, 1990), children’s personal