vocal communication plays an important role in the social connection and behavior of a great number of vertebrate species. Thus while human vocal communication is enhanced substantially in face-to-face interaction, the evolution of speech has resulted in a system that can function even in the absence of direct visual observation. The sound of a threat or warning or distress can have substantial impact even at a distance from the speaker.
Social impact and embodied language
Many animals use vocalizations to maintain social group structure and to provide information relevant to a group. Even very young children use the way people speak as a marker of their social affiliation.° Such vocalizations are typically not viewed as symbolic forms that must be decoded and interpreted. Instead these vocalizations are mapped onto internal states more directly, much as human laughter may be. Although linguists and psychologists have often tried to differentiate human language from these kinds of vocalizations, language can impact us in much the same way. Perhaps language is less symbolic and more direct than scientists have thought.
What does it mean for language to have impact? If we take laughter as our model, perhaps it means that language gives rise to responses that have a direct effect on our perceptual and motor systems. Sermons may terrify because they create worlds inside of the listener that seem real. We can see and hear torment and imagine the feelings of pain and suffering. This is not a symbolic interpretation but a real experience created from language. However, just as we can distinguish the pain we feel from the pain of others,
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even when we have strong empathic responses, we can distinguish such created experiences from those that occur in the real world. The stronger the language, the richer the imagery, the more intense the delivery, the more salient the mentally created experience. One impact of language may be to create real feelings and sensations, imagined movement and behavior.’ When language hurts us through criticism, rejection or insult, it may do so by activating our experiences of real pain. When we are soothed by language, it may produce the same kind of endorphin effect that placebo treatments can invoke. When language binds us together, it may do so by creating the kind of shared emotional states that characterize empathy.
In many respects, the linguistic view of language use does not engage these ways in which language functions. Linguistics treats language as consisting of patterns of symbols divorced from their origins in a human mouth, almost like print on a page rather than speech. But it is spoken language that the social brain evolved to use—print is a very modern invention which did not play any role in our evolution. In contrast, speech is produced from a coordinate action of muscles compressing lungs and moving tongue and jaw under the control of neurophysiology and hormones. Unlike the shape of printed letters, the sound of speech is shaped by attitude and emotion and intent, and its impact may be to transfer specific embodied states from the speaker to the listener.
Conclusion
Although physicists have debated the possibility of action at a distance for quite some time, the biological form of action at a distance is well established,
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