Barriers to communication

BARRIERS TO COMMUNICATION

Noise represents any internal or external interference in the communication process, it can be caused by

Physical noise - is the outside interference that blocks the communicator / receiver from receiving the message. This noise can be from any loud speaker, music system, fan in the room, running water etc.

Physiological noise- any impairment like deafness, tooth removed, headache or pain in the body which can cause a block in effective communication.

Semantic problem - this problem arises from the choice of words used to convey a message.

Syntactical problem -caused by how a sentence is structured.

Psychological problem - when people are nervous, or reluctant to speak or preoccupied with other problems, then this causes a barrier to communication.

Social noise - when preconceived ideas are strong and if an individual is influenced by the unchangeable societal input, then these will cause problem to communication.

From noise, let us try to understand the meaning of communication, scope and levels of communication and also the important elements involved in the communication process.

THE UNIQUENESS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION

Among animals, human beings are unique. Human beings may be the only animals that can selectively communicate. Only human beings can think in abstractions, plan events in the future, and store and recall information. We can express emotions, describe events and objects and combine sounds into complicated structure.

People have an open language system while most animals have closed language system. People, because they have developed many sounds and have the ability to combine these sounds into various words, symbols with defined meanings, can combine the sounds to create meaningful units. We communicate through our primary signal systems, the senses. We see, hear, taste and touch.

Human communication involves the development of relationship among people that results in the encoding and decoding of messages. This relationship incorporates a message, communicator/ source, channel(s), communicator/ receiver, feed back, noise and environment.