CLASP
The Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability

On the pragmatics of face-to-face communication: the role of the body in social cognition and social interaction

Coordination is at the heart of human conversation. In order to interact with one another through talk, we must coordinate at many levels, first and foremost at the level of our mental states, intentions and conversational contributions. In this talk, I will present findings on the pragmatics of multi-modal communication from both production and comprehension studies. In terms of production, I will, firstly, throw light on how co-speech gestures are used in the coordination of meaning to allow interactants to arrive at a shared understanding of the things they talk about, and, secondly, on how gesture and gaze are employed in the coordination of speaking turns in spontaneous conversation, with special reference to the psycholinguistic and cognitive challenges that turn-taking poses. In terms of comprehension, I will focus on communicative intentions and the interplay of ostensive and semantic multi-modal signals in triadic communication contexts. My talk will bring these different findings together to make the argument for richer research paradigms that capture more of the complexities and sociality of face-to-face conversational interaction. Advancing the field of multi-modal communication in this way will allow us to more fully understand the psycholinguistic processes that underlie human language use and language comprehension.