Beliefs expressed in talk and silence 1.

High-context cultures: hold strong contextual meaning silence can make understanding possible. 2. Western rhetorical model: silence viewed as empty pauses. For collectivistic cultures, silence may occur in conversations without creating tension, which does not hold true for individualistic cultures. e.g. In Oriental cultures silence is much more important. While in Western cultures silence might be interpreted as failure to communicate, in Oriental cultures it is considered as a sign of respect. A pause can be used to process the information and assure that the conversation partner has finished his or her turn. We therefore presume pauses to be a turn-taking signal in Arabic conversations while this does not hold true for American dialogs. Harmony vs. confrontation The silence of the Chinese can be linked to their propensity to seek harmony rather than confrontation. As a result, when the Chinese hold discussions, few people would like to speak out their opinions voluntarily in public areas. Even they do, their participation is never argumentative. They never openly expressed disagreement with others because it is considered to be aimed at the individual, thus will damage the long-nourished and established harmonious social relationship, which has a very important position in Chinese society. Collectivism vs. individualism The Chinese and Americans preference to silence or debate is also a reflection of their different views of collectivism and individualism. Chinese society values collectivism which expects people to identify with and work well in groups which protect them in exchange for loyalty and compliance. In Americans individualism, uniqueness and self-determination

are valued. A person is more admirable if he is a self-made man or makes up his own mind or shows initiative or work well independently. Table: Differences found in the corpus analysis forthe two cultures America and Arabia Average occurrence (per minute) listener speech (total) feedback (<= 1 sec) silence (>0.5 sec) silence (>1 sec) same speaker overlaps (per minute) overlaps (per speech-floor) (c 1 b ngkh ostcho o nd Gu Xiao-le) America 10.62 8.02 6.35 1.34 0.99 11.23 1.08 Arabia 14.01 10.86 7.75 2.16 1.62 13.84 0.99 p 0.10 0.08 0.15 0.09 0.08 0.21 0.16 c k?! trang 3

inh ngl nqu, k bi t voppt

A research shows that only a few Chinese people liked to speak out their own ideas in public when they held different ideas with others, while most others preferred to keep silent while still sticking to their own opinions in order to keep harmonious relationships with others. On the other hand, the answers given by the American subjects are quite the opposite to those of their Chinese counterparts. Most of them regarded themselves as talkers and were willing to make contribution in group discussions; almost all of them felt uncomfortable with silence; non of them considered being talkative a negative quality; most thought debates with friends would not affect their friendship.