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The aim? 

For participants to briefly experience and then reflect on some of the challenges experienced as a non-speaker in a world that privileges spoken communication.

The strategies used by attendees were multiple. 

Miming, mimicry, Makaton.

Communication boards, picture cards, AAC devices.

Drawing, spelling, writing in the air. 

Creativity was present in bucketfuls.

But what was significantly absent, was sound.

Non-verbal communication does not necessarily preclude sound. It includes “behaviour of the face, body, or voice minus the linguistic content” (Hall et al., 2019, p272), and there was thus potential for all participants to use non-word sounds, pitch, volume, and intonation.

There was the odd noise. 

Some participants were permitted to use a small number of single words (to better reflect the reality of a minimally verbal environment), and shouts of ‘Madonna’, ‘train’ and ‘sunshine’ sporadically broke through the silence. 

But other than this, and the sound of laughter in response, that’s just what it was: silence.

Why did attendees not make more use of their voices?

Afterall, the voice is used habitually by pre-verbal, non-verbal and verbal individuals, both as a replacement for words and to augment them. 

Perhaps ‘non-verbal’ was misunderstood as ‘without sound’? Or maybe non-word noises were avoided out of fear of resorting to the spoken word, or, on a baser level, out of fear of feeling foolish?

At surface level, participants did not appear to experience inhibition. Miming was the most used of the communicative strategies, and exaggeration of facial expressions and gestures was also frequent. 

Yet it became clear throughout the lunch that participants were constrained; both by the “power of the situation” (Patterson et al., 2023), and by an un-untetherable-tether to the normative conventions associated with spoken communication.

“Unacceptable” communicative strategies were avoided: growling to express frustration; touching to get someone’s attention; imitating non-human sounds; all effective methods of communication, yet not necessarily appropriate in a professional environment and so either not used, or used with discomfort and uncertainty.

Participants instead centralised those communicative strategies which are perceived to be appropriate within a professional environment: active listening techniques; observation of facial expression, gesture and body language; attendance to context as an aid to understanding. 

Were these communication strategies successful?

To a degree.

But the feedback from participants?

It was hard work. 

Nuance, minutiae, intangibility? 

Impossible.

Confidence that one’s communication partner had properly understood?

Nope.

If one communication strategy failed, participants tried another; but elicitation of detail and expression of subtlety were difficulties common to all strategies.

Perhaps this is unsurprising.

Non-verbal communication can be separate from language (Patterson et al., 2023), but many of the forms relied on by the participants in this lunch (for example, facial expression) were those which generally occur in complex interaction with speech, and which cannot fully convey meaning alone (Hall et al., 2019). With the removal of speech, participants found themselves limited to half a communication method. 

But the retention of the expectations associated with speech constrained their ability to replace the missing half. AAC devices and communication boards were deemed helpful, but limited in the vocabulary and complexity they offered; and potentially effective communicative strategies, such as touch or non-word sounds, could not be used without breaking normative conventions.

The result? An insurmountable superficiality of interaction. Participants found this limiting and frustrating, and noted feelings of fear and vulnerability at their inability to express their personality, share their sense of humour, or bond with others. 

They also found that they had to work far harder to elicit meaning, and pay conscious attention to non-verbal behaviours which are typically understood intuitively; yet still found themselves unsure whether intended meaning had been understood correctly. They commented on the need to think carefully about how to communicate an idea, on the difficulty of doing this in real time, and on the increased intimacy required between communication partners.

These comments suggest an unintended outcome of the lunch: participants experienced something of the challenge faced by many neurodivergent individuals in fast-paced communicative situations. Although lessened somewhat by a shared social understanding and a largely intuitive grasp of normative non-verbal communication, the concentration, the doubt, and the misunderstanding created by enforced use of a non-instinctive communication method were all there.

Was the lunch a true representation of what it is like to be unable to communicate using spoken words?

No.

This was 45 minutes; no more than a split-second glimpse into the experience of those individuals for whom communication without words is the norm.

Moreover, participants remained bounded by conventions associated with spoken communication in a way which was not reflective of reality in many minimally-verbal environments. Normative non-verbal communication styles were privileged, and whilst this did create barriers to communication by limiting creativity, the shared social, cultural and situational understanding of participants attending the lunch meant that this privileging of the normative also served as a communicative tool.

As speaking individuals, we were unable to fully recreate the experience of individuals for whom communication without words is a permanent reality.

But the lunch did prompt participants to realise how much they ordinarily rely on verbal language and gave them a very small taste of the frustrations which may be experienced by individuals who do not do this, or for whom normative methods of communication are non-instinctive.

Most importantly, the experience raised questions which we had not previously considered.

Do the non-verbal communicative strategies used by speaking individuals align with those preferred by non-speaking individuals? 

Or do we doubly disadvantage non-verbal individuals by privileging normative non-verbal communication strategies within non-normative communication settings? 

Is it better to encourage non-verbal individuals to use the non-verbal half of spoken communication?

Or better to support them to develop different, but whole forms of communication unconnected with speech?

And how many internal voices remain unheard because we lower our expectations and assume that ‘without spoken words’ alongside ‘without normative non-verbal communication’ means ‘without anything to say’?

“Please try to communicate without words.”

As easy as it sounds?

Absolutely not.