Communicative Interaction

From government eavesdropping to Internet crime, reality TV to computer-mediated communication and mobile telephones, the face of communication has fundamentally changed. The contingencies and complexities of communication can be witnessed in old and new media, in changing patterns of face-to-face interactions and the pluralization of the self and blurring of the distinction between the real and virtual. To date, theories of interaction have been slow to conceptualize communication in terms of its instabilities. Social communication models remain heavily indebted to an interaction paradigm which is often intuitive, epistemologically conservative and even a-critical. By contrast, an interdisciplinary programme in communication covers a complex field which requires the broadest possible range of approaches beyond current disciplinary confines. This collection seeks to examine some of the implications for our understanding of interaction when communication is conceptualized as a complex uncertainty.

From government eavesdropping to Internet crime, reality TV to computer-mediated communication and mobile telephones, the face of communication has fundamentally changed. The contingencies and complexities of communication can be witnessed in old and new media, in changing patterns of face-to-face interactions and the pluralization of the self and blurring of the distinction between the real and virtual. To date, theories of interaction have been slow to conceptualize communication in terms of its instabilities. Social communication models remain heavily indebted to an interaction paradigm which is often intuitive, epistemologically conservative and even a-critical. By contrast, an interdisciplinary programme in communication covers a complex field which requires the broadest possible range of approaches beyond current disciplinary confines. This collection seeks to examine some of the implications for our understanding of interaction when communication is conceptualized as a complex uncertainty.

The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600 ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking, such as its timing, are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages – with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals – do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This Research Topic contributes to advancing our understanding of these problems by summarizing recent work from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialog and conversation analysis, linguists, phoneticians, and comparative ethologists.

Understanding Everyday Communicative Interactions is a unique text that uses a situated discourse analysis (SDA) framework to examine basic human communication and the interactions of those with communicative disorders in everyday and clinical settings. The book introduces SDA as a theoretical and empirical approach for examining the complexities of communicative interaction. It explores how people collaborate in everyday contexts to communicate successfully and how they learn to do so. From close analysis of a pretend game played by two children and their father to an observation of a man with aphasia and his family at a football match, the present volume offers rich portraits of communicative lives and illustrates the applications of SDA. The final part of the book uses SDA methods to demonstrate how clinicians can function as communication partners even during assessments and can design rich communicative environments for therapeutic interventions. In explaining the SDA framework and equipping readers with the tools to understand the nature of human communication, this sophisticated and engaging book will be an essential reference for students, researchers, and clinicians in communication sciences and disorders.

All humans have an innate need and ability to communicate with others, and this book presents successful approaches to nurturing communicative abilities in people who have some type of communication impairment. The contributors look at a wide range of approaches, including intensive interaction, co-creative communication, sensory integration and music therapy, for a variety of impairments, including autism, profound learning disabilities, deafblindness, severe early neglect and dementia. This wide perspective provides insight into what it feels like to struggle with a communicative impairment, and how those who work with and care about such individuals can and should think more creatively about how to make contact with them. Covering both the theory and practical implementation of different interventions, this book will be invaluable for health and social work professionals, psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors, speech and language therapists, as well as researchers, teachers and students in these fields.

Atypical Interaction presents a state-of-the-art overview of research which uses conversation analysis to explore how communicative impairments impact on conversation and other forms of talk and social interaction. Although the majority of people use spoken language unproblematically in social interaction, many individuals have an atypical capacity for communication. The first collection of its kind, this book examines a wide range of conditions where the communication of children or adults is atypical, including autism spectrum disorder, dementia, stammering, hearing impairment, schizophrenia, dysarthria and aphasia. By analyzing recordings of real-life interactions, the collection highlights not only the communication difficulties and challenges faced by atypical communicators and their interlocutors in everyday life, but also the competences and often novel forms of communication displayed. With fourteen empirical chapters from leading scholars in the field and an introductory chapter which provides a background to conversation analysis and its application to the study of atypical interactions, the collection will be an invaluable resource for students, practitioners such as speech and language therapists, and researchers with an interest in human communication, communication diversity and disorder.

This book integrates recent research and practice in language teaching into a framework for analysing learning tasks.

Examines the process of communicative interaction from the respective points of view of teachers, learners and activities. It also points to ways by which modern language teachers and learners in schools can be helped to understand the moves they make in pursuit of communication.