Preverbal infants already show remarkable interactional skills, suggesting that central aspects of the interactional infrastructure develop early in infancy. But the development of adult-like patterns takes considerable time and is not yet completed by the time children reach school age.

Research Area 3 investigates the acquisition of trouble management routines in infants and children and their further development over the life span, including in (child and adult) additional language learning: How do learners acquire the different trouble-management resources and learn to successfully deploy them in anticipating and resolving trouble in communicative interaction?

Our program is anchored in research on the acquisition of interactional skills (e.g., the development of turn-timing, hesitation strategies, backchanneling behavior or response patterns), and considerably expands on existing knowledge by adding a crosslinguistic perspective: Interactional experience varies across languages, cultures and individuals, but we know very little about how this variability impacts the development and learning of interactional skills.