Cognitive and Interactive Mechanisms for Mutual Understanding in Conversation

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.