Understanding Everyday Communicative Interactions

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.

Communicative interactions are interactive processes that exist among members of a group. These are the ways in which people act with and react to other people. Everyday communicative interactions are a fundamental feature of social life. Knowledge is imparted through the social act of gesture-response in this process. Communicative interactions result in continuity and have the potential for transforming the individual or the group. Identity is reinforced, shaped, and sometimes transformed through everyday social interactions. This book provides significant information of this discipline to help develop a good understanding of everyday communicative interactions. The topics covered herein deal with the core subjects of this discipline. This book, with its detailed analyses and data, will prove immensely beneficial to professionals and students involved in this area at various levels.

Using assessment and intervention techniques during naturally occurring opportunities for interaction improves communication with people who have severe disabilities. Practical forms, examples, and case studies accompany step-by-step guidelines that help service providers, speech-language pathologists, and family members enrich their day-to-day exchanges with the people they serve and care for.

Communicating & Relating offers an account of how relating with one another emerges in communicating in everyday interacting. Prior work has indicated that human relationships arise in human communicating, and some studies have made arguments for why that is the case. Communicating & Relating moves beyond this work to offer an account of how both relating and face emerge in everyday talk and conduct: what comprises human communicating, what defines human social systems, how the social and the individual are linked in human life, and what comprises human relating and face. Part 1 develops the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communicating to address the question "How do participants constitute turns, actions, and meanings in everyday interacting?" Part 2 argues that the processes of constituting what is known cross-culturally as "face" are the processes of constituting relating, and develops Face Constituting Theory to address the question "How do participants constitute relating in everyday interacting?" The answers to both questions are grounded in evidence from everyday talk and conduct. Like other volumes in the Foundations of Human Interaction series, Communicating & Relating offers new perspectives and new research on communicative interaction and on human relationships as key elements of human sociality.

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.

This volume provides an up-to-date and evaluative review of theoretical and empirical stances on emotion and its close interaction with language and cognition in monolingual and bilingual individuals. Importantly, it presents a novel methodological approach that takes into account contextual information and hence goes beyond the reductionist approach to affective language that has dominated contemporary research. Owing to this pragmatic approach, the book presents brand new findings in the field of bilingualism and affect and offers the first neurocognitive interpretation of findings reported in clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism. This not only represents an invaluable contribution to the literature, but may also constitute a breakthrough in the investigation of the worldwide phenomenon of bilingualism. Beginning with a thorough review of the history and current state of affective research and its relation to language, spanning philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, and linguistic perspectives, the volume then proceeds to explore affect manifestation using neuropragmatic methods in monolingual and bilingual individuals. In doing so, it brings together findings from clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism with cognitive, psychophysiological and neuroimaging paradigms. By combining conceptual understanding and methodological expertise from many disciplines, this volume provides a comprehensive picture of the dynamic interactions between contextual and affective information in the language domain. Thus, Affect-Language Interactions in Native and Non-Native English Speakers: A Neuropragmatic Perspective fosters a pragmatic approach to research on affective language processing in monolingual and bilingual population, one that builds bridges across disciplines and sparks important new questions in the cognitive neuroscience of bi- and multilingualism.

Challenging current work in communication and social psychology that assumes face-to-face interaction can be adequately understood without attending to discourse expression, this volume examines how people's goals, concerns, and intentions can be related to discourse expression. The text discusses discourse-goal linkages in specific face-to-face encounters such as courtroom exchanges, marital counseling, and intellectual discussions, as well as in more general theoretical dilemmas. Because it poses a new set of questions about social actors' motivations and pre-interactional goals, this volume offers a new direction for discourse study -- one that seriously considers the thinking and strategy involved in human communication.