7 Modality
Modality
The major components of communication
An act of communication between two people typically begins with one person constructing some intended message in their mind. This person can then give that message physical reality through various movements and configurations of their body parts, called articulation. The physical linguistic signal can come in various forms, such as sound waves (for spoken languages) or light waves (for signed languages). The linguistic signal is then received, sensed, and processed by another person’s perception, allowing them to reconstruct the intended message. The entire chain of physical reality, from articulation to perception, is called the modality of the language.
Spoken and signed languages
The modality of spoken languages, such as English and Cantonese, is vocal, because they are articulated with the vocal tract; acoustic, because they are transmitted by sound waves; and auditory, because they are received and processed by the auditory system. This modality is often shortened to vocal-auditory, leaving the acoustic nature of the signal implied, since that is the ordinary input to the auditory system.
Signed languages, such as American Sign Language and Chinese Sign Language, also have a modality: they are manual, because they are articulated by the hands and arms (though most of the rest of the body can be used, too, so this component of modality might best be called corporeal); photic, because they are transmitted by light waves; and visual, because they are received and processed by the visual system. This modality is often shortened to manual-visual.
Other modalities are also possible, but full discussion is beyond the scope of this textbook. One notable example is the manual-somatic modality of tactile signing, in which linguistic signals are articulated primarily by the hands and are perceived by the somatosensory system, which is responsible for sensing various physical phenomena on the skin, such as pressure and movement. This modality can be used for deafblind people to communicate, often by adapting aspects of an existing signed language in such a way that the signs are felt rather than seen. Some examples of such languages include tactile Italian Sign Language (Checchetto et al. 2018) and a tactile version of American Sign Language called Protactile (Edwards and Brentari 2020).
Finally, it is important to note that actual instances of communication are often multimodal, with language users making use of the resources of more than one modality at a time (Perniss 2018, Holler and Levinson 2019, Henner and Robinson 2023). For example, spoken language is often accompanied by various kinds of co-speech behaviours, such as shrugging, facial expressions, and hand gestures, which are used for many meaningful functions in the linguistic signal: emphasis, emotion, attitude, shifting topics, taking turns in a conversation, etc. (Hinnell 2020). A full analysis of how language works must ultimately