Cognitive and Interactive Mechanisms for Mutual Understanding in Conversation

Abstract

Everyday conversation is, as the term suggests, a frequent and seemingly effortless phenomenon. However, when we zoom in we see that the process of achieving mutual understanding in conversation involves both complex social reasoning and finely-tuned interactive mechanisms. Referential communication provides an excellent case study for what makes everyday language interactions complex: people recruit an intricate web of cognitive capacities and interactive resources in order to get their message across. In terms of cognitive capacities, reaching mutual understanding in conversation involves social reasoning in order to establish common ground and take into account one’s conversational partner when producing and interpreting utterances. Specifically, people continuously adapt to their conversational partner by keeping track of what information is or isn’t shared (based on the situational context, preceding discourse, and general knowledge), and adjusting their utterances and interpretations accordingly. In terms of interactive resources, mechanisms that allow us to keep a conversation on track (e.g. backchannels) and the mechanisms that allow us to recover from breakdowns in communication (i.e. repair) contribute to mutual understanding. Specifically, other-initiated repair, a conversational phenomenon that has been documented cross-linguistically and observed in experimental settings, is an interactional resource for (re)establishing intersubjectivity between interlocutors. The historic separation between cognitive capacities on the one hand and interactive resources on the other hand has created an artificial divide, when in fact both mechanisms interact with, and even presuppose, one another.

Applying ordered network analysis to video-recorded physician–nurse interactions to examine communication patterns associated with shared understanding in inpatient oncology care settings

“…These types of responses signal attentiveness to the partner's communication and Open access an to find mutual compatibility between different viewpoints (eg, 'what I hear you are saying is…'). 33 However, reflection and interpretation were the least used VRM codes, and this might be one possible area for intervention development. Reflection and Interpretation involve verbalising one's thinking as well as paraphrasing another's words and paraphrasing can be a powerful strategy to overcome the differences in how physicians and nurses convey their messages to one another.…”

The evolution of hierarchically structured communication

“…Specifically, I have in mind here patterns of other- and self-initiated repair. Repair initiators have been shown to occur on average once per every 80 s of human linguistic conversation ( Dingemanse et al, 2015 ; Albert, 2018 ; Micklos and Woensdregt, 2022 ). They range from the very general (e.g., “huh?”) to the very specific (e.g., “which boy was it that missed the game?”).…”

From empirical problem-solving to theoretical problem-finding perspectives on the cognitive sciences

“…Human communication is a wholly unsurprising, commonplace thing. Yet, when looked at through the lens of existing, fallible explanations, communication can (rightly) acquire a problematic appearance (see Micklos & Woensdregt, 2022). This is because our cognitive explanations of how humans do such things as resolve misunderstandings contain large gaps (we go into case studies in sections §6.3 and §7.1).…”