Common Ground

The fact that the context of a conversation consists of not only the physical situation and the preceding dialogue but also the conversational partners themselves poses a challenge: How do people achieve mutual understanding if they both enter the conversation with their own perspective, beliefs, and knowledge? A classic account is that conversation partners gradually build up a representation of joint knowledge, or common ground, which they use to guide their utterances and interpretations (Clark, 1996, Chapter 4, 2006; Clark & Brennan, 1991). Working from the assumption that another person’s mental states are not directly observable, Clark and Marshall (1981) argue that a representation of common ground is formed using several sources of observable information: (a) physical copresence (i.e., things the conversation partners have experienced together); (b) linguistic copresence (i.e., things the conversation partners have previously talked about); and (c) community comembership (i.e., world knowledge that is likely to be shared based on being part of the same community). In addition to establishing a representation of common ground based on these information sources, conversation partners also continuously update their common ground through a process known as grounding, in which they try to establish whether their utterances have come across as intended (Clark & Brennan, 1991). This process of grounding involves a rich array of interactive mechanisms, which will be discussed in more detail in “Interactive Mechanisms” (the example of try-marking given in “Introduction” is a form of referential grounding).

If conversation partners jointly assume that they both make use of their common ground when producing and interpreting utterances, this can greatly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of referential communication. For example (assuming that communication is cooperative; Grice, 1975; Levinson, 2006), if a speaker refers to “the house,” that utterance comes with the implication that she³ assumes (given her representation of common ground) that it is specific enough for the receiver to come to a unique interpretation (Rubio-Fernández, 2021). The receiver presumably knows about many houses, the knowledge of which is presumably shared with different people. But the commitment implicit in the producer’s utterance can guide the receiver in his interpretation process: only by assuming that the producer has reason to believe that her utterance provides enough information to come to a unique representation based on their common ground can the receiver infer which house the producer is referring to (Brown-Schmidt et al., 2015; Sperber & Wilson, 1995). As this example illustrates, successful use of common ground requires perspective-taking. “Perspective-Taking” discusses how such perspective-taking is used in both production and comprehension. Note, however, that common ground is a narrower concept than perspective-taking: whereas perspective-taking can be done unilaterally, the (successful) establishment of common ground requires conversation partners to jointly keep track of what is mutually known.

Perspective-Taking

Perspective-Taking Based on Physical Copresence

The extent to which producers and receivers take each other’s perspective into account based on physical copresence (i.e., things the interlocutors have experienced together) has been productively investigated using an experimental paradigm developed by Keysar et al. (2000). In this experiment, two participants view the same array of objects placed in a grid of squares (resembling cubbyholes), but some objects are occluded from one participant’s point of view (as illustrated in Figure 1). This paradigm allows the experimenters to create situations where the visual context for one participant (two differently sized glasses, one of which is in the participant’s “privileged ground”) is incongruent with the partner-specific context (a single glass in common ground). In the production version of this task, the participant (the “director”) is asked to provide instructions to a receiver (the “matcher”) for how to rearrange the objects in the grid to match a certain configuration. In the comprehension version of the task, the producer is a confederate who gives scripted instructions, and the participant is asked to take on the role of the matcher while being eye-tracked.

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Figure 1. Illustration of perspective-taking experimental paradigm.

Source: Developed by Keysar et al. (2000).

Participants are placed opposite each other, looking at the same array of objects arranged in cubbyholes. However, one of these cubbyholes is occluded from Participant B’s point of view, such that Participant A can see both glasses whereas Participant B can only see the large glass. In other words, the large glass (as well as the crayon and the tennis ball) are in common ground, but the small glass is only in Participant A’s privileged ground.

In the production task, the variable of interest is whether the director (who has a view with something in privileged ground, similar to Participant A in Figure 1) produces overspecified utterances: utterances that give more information than what is strictly necessary for the receiver to uniquely identify the intended referent (such as saying the large glass rather than just the glass if the recipient has the view of Participant B in Figure 1). The extra information given in such an overspecified utterance is redundant (since the receiver can only see one glass), and therefore less efficient (Grice, 1975).⁴ Moreover, there is some evidence that overspecified utterances are potentially confusing to the receiver (Engelhardt et al., 2006; Gann & Barr, 2014). Studies using this experimental paradigm have shown that in a condition where the receiver can only see one of the objects (as Participant B in Figure 1), producers leave out the redundant adjective about 50% of the time. In contrast, in a condition where the receiver can see both objects, producers include the adjective in their utterances between 70% and 100% of the time (depending on the complexity of the visual scene and other task factors; for reviews, see Brown-Schmidt et al., 2015; Ryskin et al., 2015). Taken together, these results indicate that producers tend to take the receiver’s perspective into account. The producer’s communicative goal may also play a role in modulating this effect. Yoon et al. (2012) showed that producers are more likely to take their receiver’s perspective into account when requesting the receiver to perform an action with the target object (i.e., moving it) compared to when they are simply informing the receiver of an action that is being performed with the target object by the experimenter. This suggests that the more crucial it is for the producer’s communicative goal that the receiver reach a unique interpretation, the more likely the producer is to take into account the receiver’s perspective.

In the reception version of this task, the variable of interest is whether the matcher (who now has a perspective with something in privileged ground, similar to Participant A in Figure 1) looks at objects that are only in her privileged ground when presented with an utterance that is underspecified from her egocentric perspective (i.e., when she doesn’t take the producer’s perspective into account). For example, a critical trial in the reception task may consist of a case where the receiver can see three differently sized glasses, with the smallest one being in privileged ground, and the confederate director asks her to move the small glass. When the eye-tracking measures reveal that a participant looked at an object in her privileged ground before picking up another object and moving it according to the director’s instructions, this is taken as evidence that she (briefly) considered the object in privileged ground as a potential referent of the director’s utterance. The assumption here is that because the objects that are in the matcher’s privileged ground are occluded from the director’s point of view, they cannot possibly be the director’s intended referent. Therefore, a participant who behaves fully allocentrically (i.e., always taking the producer’s perspective into account) should never look at the objects in her own privileged ground. Studies using this comprehension version of the task have yielded mixed results. Early studies found that participants generally failed to interpret utterances exclusively from the producer’s perspective (Keysar et al., 2000, 2003; Lin et al., 2010). Keysar et al. (2000, 2003), and Lin et al. (2010) argued that this shows that perspective-taking in comprehension is not an automatic and effortless process, but that instead people are “reflexively mindblind”: interpreting utterances from their egocentric perspective by default and only overcoming this egocentric bias through effortful perspective-taking when the egocentric interpretation causes ambiguity.

However, later variations on this experiment showed that participants do rapidly restrict the domain of interpretation to only those objects that are in common ground (Brown-Schmidt, 2012; Hanna & Tanenhaus, 2004; Hanna et al., 2003; Heller et al., 2008). Furthermore, recent work by Hawkins and Goodman (2016), Hawkins et al. (2021) and Rubio-Fernandez (2017) has called into question the assumption that considering objects in privileged ground as potential referents is necessarily a sign of egocentric processing. Hawkins and Goodman (2016), Hawkins et al. (2021) show that the utterances that lead to a recipient ignoring her interlocutor’s perspective in interpretation (utterances that in previous experiments were scripted by the experimenter and produced by a confederate) are in fact utterances that speakers do not naturally produce because they are uncooperative given the context. That is, if both participants know that some squares in the grid are occluded for their interlocutor (i.e., if these “known unknowns” are part of common ground), it is rational for the director to produce overinformative utterances in order to avoid potential ambiguity. If the receiver in turn expects the director to do this, it is rational for her to select the object that best fits the producer’s utterance, which will lead to her being “tricked” into considering an object that is occluded from the director’s view. To test this hypothesis, Hawkins and Goodman (2016), Hawkins et al. (2021) ran a version of the task where both the director and the receiver are participants (rather than the director being a confederate) and the director is free to produce her own instructions (rather than following a script). They found that directors naturally produce utterances that more precisely pick out the target object relative to the distractor object in the receiver’s privileged view (which is hidden for the director) and that recipients show better performance in terms of perspective-taking. Hawkins et al. therefore conclude that the early findings of egocentricity reported by Keysar et al. (2000, 2003), and Lin et al. (2010) were (ironically) the result of sophisticated social reasoning about how a cooperative producer would be likely to choose her utterances given the context. In sum, questions remain about the extent to which perspective-taking in comprehension is automatic and effortless, but it is clear that receivers are able to employ it when the circumstances of the experiment are sufficiently natural. To get to a full understanding of the extent to which people engage in social reasoning in referential communication, future experiments should therefore carefully consider their ecological validity (see also Brennan & Hanna, 2009; de Ruiter & Albert, 2017; Rubio-Fernández, 2017).

Perspective-Taking Based on Linguistic Copresence

Linguistic copresence (i.e., things the interlocutors have previously talked about) has been shown to be taken into account by interlocutors as well. An experimental paradigm that has shown this convincingly is a referential communication task where one participant (the director) has to give instructions to another participant (the matcher) for how to rearrange an array of novel objects (such as tangrams; see Figure 2; Brown-Schmidt, 2012; Hanna & Tanenhaus, 2004). In contrast to referential communication tasks where the stimuli used are familiar objects that can easily be named, this referential communication task uses novel stimuli, for which participants have to cocreate novel labels that can uniquely describe each stimulus. Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) showed that over multiple rounds of interaction between a pair of participants, these descriptions become shorter and opaquer. This shortening of descriptions indicates that the participants decrease their joint effort over time, while the increase in the opacity of descriptions indicates that the participants gradually build up common ground based on linguistic copresence. For example, for the tangram highlighted in red in Figure 2, a director might start with the description bowing man with a triangle bum, which might in a later round be shortened to simply triangle bum (adapted from Micklos et al., 2020). Importantly, these short and opaque descriptions that develop over a number of trials are dyad-specific. It has been shown that if participants are asked to describe the same stimuli to a new, unfamiliar, partner, they switch back to longer and more elaborate descriptions, sometimes also involving a reconceptualization of the stimulus (Brennan & Clark, 1996; Horton & Gerrig, 2002; Horton & Spieler, 2007; Wilkes-Gibbs & Clark, 1992).

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Figure 2. Set of tangram shapes.

Source: Used in and reproduced from Micklos et al. (2020).

A number of experiments have shown that shared linguistic experience is also taken into account during comprehension (Brennan & Hanna, 2009; Brown-Schmidt, 2009; Brown-Schmidt et al., 2008; Horton & Slaten, 2012; Metzing & Brennan, 2003). For example, Brown-Schmidt et al. (2008) developed an eye-tracking experiment where participants played a cooperative task in which some stimuli were in common ground while others were in privileged ground. As part of this game, producers asked questions like What’s below the cow that’s wearing the hat? To the receiver, the start of this utterance (What’s below the cow) was ambiguous because two different cows were part of the visual display (e.g., one wearing a hat, and another wearing shoes). In one condition, the task was constructed in such a way that participants had just discussed the animal below the cow wearing shoes, thus bringing that animal (the one below the cow wearing shoes) into common ground. Brown-Schmidt et al. contrasted this with a control condition in which participants had just discussed a different, unrelated animal. Brown-Schmidt et al. found that in the first condition, receivers rapidly interpreted the producer’s question (during the ambiguous part of the utterance) to be about the cow with the hat. This indicates that receivers took into account that the animal below the cow wearing shoes must already be known to the producer, given that they had just discussed it (see further the concept of “givenness”: Krifka, 2008). In the control condition in contrast, the eye-tracking results showed that receivers considered both cows to be the potential intended referent until the disambiguating word hat was produced.

The Sociocognitive Foundations of Language

Reaching mutual understanding requires that the receiver recovers the producer’s meaning, that is, the producer’s communicative intention, over and above the literal meaning of the utterance. But what does it mean for a producer to have a communicative intention? What psychological states are involved? In his seminal work on meaning, Grice (1957) argued that what sets communicative acts apart from noncommunicative acts is their intentional nature. A communicative act can only achieve its goal when it is recognized by the receiver as being a communicative act. Therefore, a communicative intention needs to be overt. Building on this work, Sperber and Wilson (1995) argued that human communication is ostensive-inferential; where the ostensive part refers to the producer’s role in making their communicative intention overt, and the inferential part refers to the receiver’s role in inferring the producer’s communicative intention (see also Levinson, 2000; Scott-Phillips, 2015, 2017). Sperber and Wilson argued that ostensive-inferential communication involves (a) an informative intention and (b) a communicative intention on the part of the producer. The informative intention captures what the producer wants to communicate, while the communicative intention captures that the producer wants to communicate. Note, however, that not every linguistic utterance is produced with the intention to inform; “Stop tickling me!” for example, is produced with the intention to induce a particular behavior. This led Moore (2017) to the following reformulation of Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) analysis of the intentions involved in ostensive-inferential (also known as “Gricean”) communication. A producer’s utterance is intentionally communicative if, and only if, they produce the utterance with the intention that:

According to Sperber (2000), holding as well as recognizing these intentions requires fourth-order metarepresentations of mental states. If Jaime wants to inform Andy that Bill got his first vaccination today, these representations are:

The informative intention is encompassed by the first and second order, while the communicative intention is encompassed by the third and fourth order. Although it has been shown that human adults are in principle able to entertain such metarepresentations of others’ mental states up to as many as seven levels of embedding (O’Grady et al., 2015), one may question whether we use fourth-order metarepresentations in every single communicative interaction (see Moore, 2016; Scott-Phillips, 2016). Moreover, children’s ability to explicitly represent others’ mental states (known as mindreading or theory of mind) takes several years to develop, and goes hand-in-hand with their language development, rather than fully preceding it (Baldwin & Moses, 2001; Meristo et al., 2011; Peterson & Siegal, 2000; Pyers & de Villiers, 2013; Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2005; Slaughter & Peterson, 2011; Tomasello, 2000). This mindreading (or theory of mind) ability is what enables people to take each other’s perspectives in conversation, and therefore also underlies the ability to establish and maintain common ground (see Anderson, 2021; Bohn et al., 2019, 2021; Frank & Goodman, 2014; Goodman & Frank, 2016 for computational modeling work that captures the recursive social reasoning involved in pragmatic communication).

The apparent contradiction between this theoretical analysis arguing that complex representations of mental states are required for any ostensive-inferential communication on the one hand and the fact that mindreading abilities develop alongside language (rather than preceding it) on the other hand has led to new theoretical development in the analysis of what cognitive abilities are minimally required for doing ostensive-inferential communication (Moore, 2017). Moore shows that the analysis of what cognitive processes are involved in ostensive-inferential (or Gricean) communication assumes three cognitive abilities that are likely not present in infants. Firstly, it assumes a concept of belief, which is importantly different from the representation of other types of mental states (such as “knowing”) in that beliefs are about how another individual represents the world, in a way that may not correspond to reality (and therefore requires a form of representation that can be entertained completely independently from the individual’s own representation of the world; see e.g., Birch & Bloom, 2007). Secondly, it assumes the ability to make complex inferences about others’ goal-directed behavior. And finally, it assumes the ability to entertain fourth-order metarepresentations. Moore puts forward an analysis of a class of “minimally Gricean” acts, which do not run the gamut of human language interactions, but do satisfy a minimal definition of Gricean communication, and require none of these three cognitive abilities to be in place. This may then solve the issue of how infants are able to engage meaningfully in communicative interactions from a very young age and are able to acquire language simultaneously with developing their abilities to reason about others’ minds (see also Woensdregt et al., 2016 for computational modeling work on this topic).

While even adult communicators cannot directly observe the mental states of their interlocutors, and therefore fully know their intentions, it can be observed how intentions are made visible in talk-in-interaction. Language is a social action used to make our intentions known to others and, ideally, to have others perform next actions (including appropriate communicative responses) that correspond with our intentions, or intended meanings.

Backchannels

When conversation goes smoothly, mutual understanding is frequently acknowledged by nonactive participants (i.e., recipients) by means of backchannels, or minimal responses such as mhmm, yeah, uh-huh, and head nods. Backchannels make up a range of responses and similarly a range of functions. For instance, “yeah” or “oh no” can act as assessments⁶ on the prior information, while “uh-huh” functions as a continuer wherein the recipient acknowledges the current ongoing turn and signals its continuation (Bangerter & Clark, 2003; Schegloff, 1982). Similar to continuers, backchannels that function as tokens of understanding display passive recipiency. They are not meant as turns that seek the floor, despite potentially occurring at the end of a turn unit, but they do provide the producer with a cue to the recipient’s attention and understanding. By passing the opportunity to take a turn when providing a minimal response, then, recipients are acknowledging their understanding of the prior instead of taking a turn to initiate repair—an action that is always relevant (Schegloff, 1982). As a form of collateral communication (Clark, 1996, p. 241), backchannels instead provide metacommentary on the conversation itself rather than its content.

Backchannels can take on various forms and are ubiquitous across linguistic modalities. Common verbal backchannels include mhmm, yeah, uh-huh, and their equivalents across languages. Addressees’ mimicry of producers’ hand gestures in a tangram experiment also demonstrates mutual understanding by way of collateral communication (Holler & Wilkin, 2011). Other backchannel forms demonstrate the multimodal nature of interaction. Facial gestures can be used in isolation or jointly with speech/signs to do the working of backchanneling. Brow raises (Chovil, 1991), smiles (Brunner, 1979), and blinks (Hömke et al., 2017) have all been shown to function as backchanneling. Long blinks, for example, are often jointly produced with head nods or vocalizations to signal continued recipiency even in light of a current speaker’s self-repair (Hömke et al., 2017). Regardless of form, backchannels keep conversations progressing in a state of mutual understanding.

While backchannels may seem inconsequential—they are not always included in transcripts, subtitles, or in retellings of conversations, for example—producers rely on them when monitoring for understanding (Bavelas et al., 2000) and are quite sensitive to their absence (Krauss & Weinheimer, 1966). Evidence for a producer’s seeking of mutual understanding through these acknowledgment tokens can be seen in examples of try-marking. Speakers might, for instance, use rising intonation over a potentially problematic referent (Schegloff, 1982, p. 79). This rising intonation attempts to make the referential expression operate as a question: do you understand this referent? In designing a turn as such, the speaker provides the addressee with an opportunity to indicate their mutual understanding so that the conversation can progress.

However, as Schegloff (1982) observes, backchannels are participants’ claims to mutual understanding and do not necessarily mean mutual understanding has been achieved. Therefore, when recipients recognize their lack of understanding, a set of interactional resources becomes available, namely that of OIR.

Observational Accounts of OIR

Coordinating actions among individuals through language is a feat we often take for granted. Humans are able to carry out this amazing ability by negotiating turn allocation, making use of nonlinguistic information, and aligning to interlocutors’ meanings. Though we often do this without thought, sometimes things go wrong. Fortunately, conversation affords a systematic, social mechanism to resolve problems in communication, whether they arise from issues of hearing or seeing, or from misunderstandings; this is the process of repair. In fact, repair is always a relevant next action (Schegloff, 1982) and such sequences take precedence over other actions in conversation (Kendrick, 2015; Sacks et al., 1974), such as a response to a question; the need to resolve the trouble is a prerequisite to continuing the initial action. And often, in order to progress the conversation, what needs to be repaired is mutual understanding.

In the face of unrecognizable referents or inadequate next actions, for instance, OIR sets up a sequence of actions through which repairables are modified and retested for mutual understanding. OIR is a collaborative process aimed at (re)establishing intersubjectivity—or, mutual understanding—when “problematic understandings” arise (Schegloff, 1992). Who is “at fault” in these instances can be consequential for the (re)constitution of interactional relationships (Robinson, 2006), and may lie with either one or both interlocutors. While this “trouble responsibility” (p. 139) may be negotiated in the interaction, OIR is nevertheless initiated by the receiver through various strategies.

Initiation strategies of this type vary based on the degree of understanding achieved by the recipient. Three categories of repair initiation strategies⁷ are proposed by Dingemanse and Enfield (2015): open requests, restricted requests, and restricted offers (or candidate understandings). Open requests (e.g., “Huh?”) display little grasp of the prior and indicate a problem with hearing or understanding without pinpointing a specific trouble source as seen with “what” used in line 2 of Extract 1. Restricted requests pinpoint a specific trouble source as requiring repair (e.g., “To whom?”) and indicate a problem of understanding—usually by requesting clarification—or partial hearing. In Extract 2, “who?” in line 2 requests a repair to the ambiguous “they” in line 1, for instance. Finally, restricted offers are candidate understandings of the prior talk (e.g., “You mean X?”), which indicate a problem of understanding and seek confirmation. In Extract 3 and Figure 3, the recipient in line 2 adds “of cars?” to modify the phrase “polishing glass” as a means to confirm his understanding that A’s job is polishing car windows, not building windows, for instance. This candidate understanding is met with confirmation in line 3. Interlocutors tend to adhere to a principle of specificity in initiating repair, which is balanced by principles of conservation and division of labor (Dingemanse et al., 2015). That is, while it is cost effective to simply initiate with an open class “Huh?” it requires more work for the original producer to then repair the unidentified trouble source. Thus, being more specific (when possible) in indicating trouble divides the repair work equitably among the interlocutors. In launching these initiation strategies and adhering to their principles of use, recipients indicate a breakdown in communication and in particular in mutual understanding when repairing referential expressions.

Extract 1: Siwu (Neighbors_4875900 reproduced from Dingemanse, 2015)

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Extract 2: Cha’palaa (CHSF2011_06_25S2_1350464 reproduced from Floyd, 2015)

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Extract 3: Argentine Sign Language (ASAM_244140 reproduced from Manrique, 2016)

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Figure 3. B offers a candidate understanding of A’s turn.

Source: Reproduced from Manrique (2016).

Phenomenological accounts based in CA describe OIR across a range of languages and suggest that certain features of repair are pragmatic universals (Dingemanse & Enfield, 2015; Dingemanse et al., 2015). Given the importance of repair in resolving problems in communication, it was supposed that such a mechanism should exist—in some form—cross-linguistically (Schegloff, 1987). Dingemanse and colleagues’ (2015) comparative metastudy indeed demonstrates that OIR is used across languages as disparate as Cha’palaa in Ecuador (Floyd, 2015); Lao (Enfield, 2015), Yélî Dnye (Levinson, 2015), and Malay (Mohd Jan & Saad, 2018) in Asia; Icelandic (Gisladottir, 2015) and Italian (Rossi, 2015) in Europe; Siwu (Dingemanse, 2015) in Africa; and Murrinh-Patha (Blythe, 2015) in Northern Australia. Moreover, OIR follows similar patterns of use in nonverbal modalities, including Argentine Sign Language (Manrique, 2016), American Sign Language (Dively, 1998; Most, 2003), Norwegian Sign Language (Skedsmo, 2020), Tactile Australian Sign Language (Willoughby et al., 2014), Swiss- German Sign Language (Girard-Groeber, 2020), and Chinantec whistled speech (Sicoli, 2016). The three basic strategies for initiating repair, as well as the principles for specificity and least collaborative effort, are found across various language families and isolates (Dingemanse et al., 2015) and across communicative modalities, thus demonstrating the universal nature of OIR. That is, while the phonetic and/or lexical realization of OIR may be language-specific, sharing these pragmatic universals means OIR is organized and functions similarly cross-linguistically.

Highlighting the multimodal nature of interaction, interlocutors can recruit numerous resources to initiate or supplement repair initiation. The incorporation of the face and body as semiotic resources in repair highlights the multimodal display of misunderstanding wherein these resources come to mutually elaborate one another (Goodwin, 2012). For instance, the face and body can be recruited to mark misunderstanding as with the eyebrow raise or furrow (Kendrick, 2015), the head poke or lateral tilt (Seo & Koshik, 2010), gaze patterns in Yélî Dyne (Levinson, 2015), and the freeze-gaze in Argentine Sign Language (Manrique, 2016). These resources are sufficiently embedded in doing repair such that even Tactile Auslan users (Deaf users of Australian Sign Language—Auslan—who have degenerative vision loss) continue to incorporate facial expressions and shrugs that would not be perceptible to their interlocutors but had been part of their Auslan interactions priors to vision loss (Willoughby et al., 2014). Recruiting embodied resources beyond the word or sign highlights a divergence in communication: something has gone wrong and it needs to be addressed.

Once repair has been initiated, it can then be resolved. Like repair initiations, repair solutions also may be taken up by either the original producer (self) or the recipient (other). With other-initiated self-repairs (OISR) that arise from problems of hearing/seeing, a producer might simply repeat the original phrase. With problems of understanding, however, the trouble source might be clarified or elaborated upon or replaced entirely with a new word or phrase (Schegloff et al., 1977). The degree to which the original utterance is modified in OISR depends on the type of initiation strategy used by the “other,” such that initiation strategies are designed for certain solutions (Dingemanse & Enfield, 2015). Trouble source repairers, then, design solutions to match what the recipient has located as problematic (recall recipient design in “Perspective-Taking”) and by doing so put forth a best effort attempt to regain mutual understanding. Once the repair is performed, and no further trouble sources emerge, the repair sequence is closed by resuming where the producer left off (e.g., responding to an invitation). Acknowledging the repair may also precede the continuation of the prior action; acknowledgment tokens such as “oh” and “right” will then come before returning to the original action (Heritage, 1984; Jefferson, 1972; Koivisto, 2015). These tokens, similar to backchannels, display a (potential) return to mutual understanding.

In itself, repair is not a guarantee of mutual understanding. It is an interactive process meant to align interlocutors with the goal of achieving mutual understanding in order to continue with ongoing social actions. The ultimate accomplishment is then the progression of the interaction, which may continue with participants having a “good enough” understanding of referents (Albert & de Ruiter, 2018; Robinson, 2014). Therefore, it is possible that intersubjectivity cannot be reached, even through multiple repair attempts, and that interlocutors may be forced to move on from problematic talk or from the interaction as a whole (for an extended example of this regarding reference, see Schegloff, 1992, pp. 1334–1337). In cooperative communication, though, we might suspect that interlocutors will repeat attempts to reestablish mutual understanding, at least within reason. Experimental studies involving OIR might lend insight into how interlocutors recruit this interactive mechanism in order to carry out cooperative communication tasks.

Experimental Accounts of OIR

Not only has repair been well documented in the service of resolving miscommunication in natural interactions, it has also been experimentally investigated. In various fields, including experimental semiotics, experimental pragmatics, language and cultural evolution, and dialogue studies, the question of when repair occurs, and what effect it has on the experimental task and its outcomes, has been explored.

The role of feedback—backchannel and repair mechanisms—in the dialogue surrounding tasks that are jointly carried out by participants is another line of inquiry in experimental semiotics. In a metastudy of numerous referential communication tasks (e.g., Lego building, maze, and tangram tasks), Bangerter and Clark (2003) identify backchannels such as mmhm, uh-huh, and yeah as horizontal project markers that allow for the continuation of ongoing actions in the task. Backchannels signal a “go-ahead” for directors to continue the current or next action, and pass on the opportunity to take the floor. Repairs, on the other hand, act as vertical project markers, which set apart subprojects in task-oriented dialogue. This is especially the case with clarification requests that set up a side sequence wherein information is requested, clarified, and acknowledged before returning to the task at hand (e.g., building a Lego structure, navigating a maze, or identifying a shape). Feedback not only influences the task dialogue but is also influenced by the context and goals of interaction. For instance, Fusaroli et al. (2017) find increased use of repair in task-oriented dialogue compared with free, spontaneous dialogue. Moreover, the frequency of repair types differs depending on the type of interaction. Task-oriented dialogue relies more on explicit negotiation and confirmations (i.e., the restricted repair formats in Dingemanse & Enfield, 2015) while spontaneous dialogue tends to favor more generic forms of repair (i.e., open request formats in Dingemanse & Enfield, 2015) and backchannels (Dideriksen et al., 2019, 2020; Fusaroli et al., 2017). These findings demonstrate how repair may be more relevant in certain contexts, namely in task-oriented talk and when doing reference. These contexts involve talk that becomes actionable by recipients, as producers might be expected to be more accountable for the veracity of their utterances.

In language evolution studies, the faithfulness of signal transmission is paramount given the context of establishing new conventions for communication; that is, linguistic alignment might be more consequential in cases of developing shared conventions, like labels. Some of these studies consider the role of interactive mechanisms in attaining mutual understanding through the conventionalization and systematization of emergent form-meaning pairs through iterated referential communication paradigms. In these experiments, participants are either given an artificial language to use in referring to objects, or they are asked to spontaneously create signals to refer to those objects. In some paradigms the referents are novel while in others the signal or modality is novel. The iterated nature of these paradigms involves the developing signal-meaning system to be “passed down” to another set of users, who then use and modify the system to be passed down to yet another set of users (called “generational turnover”). Though not many investigations of language evolution incorporate repair as an explicit factor in the conventionalization process, it has been found to varying degrees, and especially in early stages of iterated referential communication games, even when participants were not instructed on the ability to use it (Fay et al., 2010, 2018; Macuch Silva et al., 2020). These studies underscore the ubiquity of repair but they do not reveal that individual turns with repair aid the identification of the correct referent, or communicative accuracy (Fay et al., 2018). This finding, though, reflects the nature of repair in natural conversations; repair is a mechanism to facilitate mutual understanding, not a guarantor of it. In fact, the presence of repair is itself a signal of troublesome referencing (Micklos et al., 2020), and early repair in particular might facilitate accuracy in later turns (Micklos et al., 2018). However, the communicative efficiency of signals is supported by repair in iterated communication games. Just as previous studies using established languages have shown, referential expressions that could be modified through feedback processes are shorter, for example, gestures in Fay et al. (2013), or less complex, for example, drawings in Fay et al. (2018) as seen in Figure 4. What is most notable in these experiments is that repair is used as an interactive mechanism to attain mutual understanding even when not explicitly given as a tool.

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Figure 4. Over repeated plays of a communication game, the drawn representations for “Parliament” become more simplified in conditions that allow for alignment (i.e., shared sign system allowed) and especially feedback (e.g., clarification requests).

Source: Reproduced from Fay et al. (2018).

In language evolution experiments more explicitly testing the effects of repair (or, “feedback”), it has been found that repair does help communicative efficiency. That is, the ability to repair can lead to increased alignment to less complex and more systematic communicative conventions. In graphical communication tasks, the opportunity to mutually modify a partner’s output led to more abstraction in the drawings (Healey et al., 2007) and to less drawing space (Fay et al., 2010, 2018). Healey et al. (2007) suggest the finding of “repair-driven co-ordination process” in communication could likely be observed in emerging gestural systems (and is widely demonstrated in vocal systems; Jefferson, 1987). In fact, in cross-signing and silent gesture tasks, pairs that engaged in repair saw greater systematicity in referential expressions (Byun, Roberts, et al., 2018; Micklos, 2016, respectively). And, though Macuch Silva et al. (2020) did not find an increase in communicative efficiency while using repair in terms of turn length, repair in these turns did lead to subsequently shorter turns. That is, the shorter the turn length, the more efficient the communication; undoubtedly turns involving repair would be longer than without it because repair inherently requires more turns. Despite focus on communicative accuracy and efficiency in these studies, some also reflect the findings from natural data with respect to strategy use and specificity. All three repair strategies are found in these experimental setups (Byun, Roberts, et al., 2018; Micklos, 2016), and there even tends to be a preference for using more restricted (i.e., specific) strategies, as in natural conversations.

It is important to note here that the affordances of a given experimental design (including communicative modality, stimulus modality, degree of interactivity, meaning space, etc.) will influence the degree to which (spontaneous) repair emerges. For instance, novel auditory stimuli are particularly difficult to repair with a candidate understanding, possibly due to the need to provide precise vocal reproductions for candidates (Macuch Silva et al., 2020). However, visual modalities appear more likely to lend themselves to repair sequences as they typically allow for: (a) visual access to the face of a coparticipant to monitor understanding, and (b) the opportunity to act upon a meaning space by, for instance, pointing to a gestured meaning. The phenomenological descriptions of repair similarly indicate the benefits of visual access. While access to facial cues seems to increase the likelihood of engaging in repair, modalities that produce visual artifacts can do so as well. For example, in Fay et al. (2010) abstract meanings were communicated in a Pictionary task wherein the graphical signal became an artifact upon which graphical repairs could be performed by drawing question marks, checks, or other indicators of misunderstanding. While only a limited set of repair strategies are possible in a given modality, it nonetheless remains a valuable resource for referential communication and mutual understanding in contexts of emergent conventions.