Communication models

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.

COMMUNICATION MODELS

Communication models help us to see the components of communication .

1. The linear model - According to this a speaker encodes a message and sends it to a listener through one or more of the sensory channels. The listener then receives and decodes the message. This is just a speaker / listener model and is called a one - way communication.

2. Interaction Model - In this model of communication, the source encodes a message and sends it to the receiver through one or more of the sensory channels. The receiver then decodes the message received. The receiver then encodes feed back (a reaction) and sends the feed back to the source, thus making it a two-way process.

3. Transactional Model - In this model encoding and decoding of the message and feed back is happening continuously or simultaneously and so one person is not labeled as the source and the other as the receiver. Both communicators assume sender and receiver roles in the transaction.

Feedback - is a message sent to the original communicator / source to reflect how the message has been perceived. This feedback can be verbal or non verbal.

The models discussed above use the very basic ones. Whatever may be the communication process there is always a lot of disturbance called 'noise' or distortion. This affects the communication process.