This chapter provides an overview of the concept of communicative competence from the perspective of the individual emphasizing empirical foundations. After stressing the notion's theoretical, methodological, and practical relevance and giving a short historical survey since the early 1960s, it relates communicative competence to the basic concept of communication and discusses criteria for communicative competence: efficiency and appropriateness. On the basis of these comments on relevance, history, and criteria, the chapter presents an overview of theoretical proposals and empirical research about the processes underlying communicative competence, specifically processes of message production, message reception, nonverbal behaviors and social problem solving, as well as underlying knowledge and representations. Finally, some relevant developmental aspects are addressed.

The following contribution presents experiences made with a system theoretical methodology within the frame of the Collaborative Research Center Situated Artificial Communicators (CRC 360) at Bielefeld University. Starting point for this methodology is, on the one hand, the belief that theoretically and empirically backed research on the complex subject of natural language communication needs a systematic and interdisciplinary integration of methods. On the other hand, this kind of integration is possible only on the basis of a system theoretical conception of linguistics, which combines the predominating structural analytical approach with a procedural analytical approach. The experts from CRC called this a change in paradigms.

Der Beitrag gibt einen Uberblick uber den aktuellen Stand der Forschung zum Textverstehen aus psycholinguistischer Sicht. Zunachst wird kurz auf die Entwicklung der Psycholinguistik hin zu einer kognitiven und kommunikativ orientierten Sprachwissenschaft eingegangen. Anschliesend werden die wichtigsten konzeptuellen, theoretischen und methodologischen Grundlagen der Textverstehensforschung vorgestellt. Wichtige semantische Verarbeitungseinheiten des Textverstehens sind die mentalen Propositionen sowie die mentalen Modelle. Die aktuelle Forschung zeigt, dass diese Einheiten nicht getrennt voneinander gesehen werden durfen, sondern eng aufeinander bezogen sind. Auf der semantischen Ebene des Textverstehens spielen sich Prozesse der Referenz, der Koharenz und der Inferenzbildung ab, die nicht nur vom Text, sondern auch vom Wissen und von den Interessen der Textrezipienten sowie von der Kommunikationssituation beeinflusst werden. Die aktuellen psycholinguistischen Theorien bilden Ausschnitte dieser komplexen Interaktion mit formalen Methoden ab. Nach einem kurzen Hinweis auf die psycholinguistische Forschung zur Ontogenese des Textverstehens werden Perspektiven fur die Anwendung der Theorien auf praktische Fragestellungen wie die der Textverstandlichkeit, der Forderung der Textkompetenz sowie der maschinellen Sprachverarbeitung aufgezeigt.

This contribution introduces the Grounded Experimental-Simulative Method which is a result of research on situated communication. The method combines qualitative and quantitative communication analysis, both supported by an annotated corpus management and analysis system with controlled experiments. The empirical result lead to the formulation of theorems for system models with specified input, intervening states and output variables. Finally, these models can be simulated on a computer. The methodology demonstrates the significance of the methods used for empirical and formal analyses in the different branches of linguistics for an integrated system-theoretical development of models.

When communication partners try to construct shared interpretations of their verbal utterances or other information in an interactive way, they are engaged in an act of communicative understanding. Cognitive factors such as linguistic and world knowledge seem to interact intimately with physical and social factors in almost all phases of this process. We propose a theoretical framework which will be able to integrate most of these factors. We present a systems analysis of the various components and processes of communicative understanding in the beginning and specify these general ideas in three subsequent chapters by research on speaker, listener and emerging joint actions. We exemplify the proposed theory in three central fields: communicative strategies for understanding clarification requests, the role of inference in understanding, and perspective taking in referential communication.