Language Challenges

Our starting point are recent discoveries in the study of face-to-face interaction – i.e., the primordial setting of human communication – which show that face-to-face interaction places heavy demands on predictive comprehension and production planning (Levinson 2016). Seen from this perspective, conversational interaction should not be expected to work so seamlessly, and we should ask why it is in fact so successful. A major piece in the puzzle is the fact that everyday conversation makes use of a highly efficient system for anticipating and resolving trouble (e.g. recasting a formulation, requesting more information, changing the prosody, producing a gesture, etc.). With these fine-grained strategies, communicators are adept at pre-empting disruptive instances of miscommunication and ensuring progressivity in interaction.

Our research program is guided by the hypothesis that the basic mechanisms for trouble management are likely to be shared, but that they are culturally and linguistically modulated, developed and learned over the life span, subject to differences in cognitive skills and styles, and adapted to different communicative settings. As such, we target interactional variability and between-setting portability of trouble management strategies as important sources of, but also resources for resolving communicative trouble. The investigation of how interactants deal with issues of variability and portability is guided by the observation that interactants have at their disposal both highly automatized routines for dealing with frequently recurring communicative tasks and the freedom to use their creativity to resolve newly emerging tasks, including trying out new solutions to old problems. We hypothesize that it is the balanced interplay of creativity and routines that is essential for successful communication and for understanding trouble management.