Delphine Dahan
Department of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania

Coordinating meaning and understanding as a collaborative process

People use language to accomplish things together. To succeed, they must coordinate their actions at multiple levels, including what the speaker means when producing their utterance and what their addressee takes them to mean. According to Clark and colleagues (e.g., 1996; Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), people who are engaged in real-time conversations collaborate to establish the mutual belief that they have understood each other. In this talk, I will flesh out the various forms that such collaboration takes. Through analyses of unscripted dialogues between individuals engaged in a goal-oriented task, I will present evidence that even in very circumscribed setting, successful communication depends on active collaboration between conversational partners.

The presentation will begin at 12:00pm. Food and drinks will be provided.