Communication Failures in Everyday Conversations: a Case Study Based on the “Retrospective Commenting Method”

Abstract

The paper deals with communication failures in everyday spoken discourse. The spontaneous character of oral speech is its basic property and becomes a prerequisite for the appearance of such a phenomenon as communicative failures. By communicative failures, we mean speech situations when the recipient of a speech message does not understand it correctly, i.e., in the way the speaker intended. The purpose of this pilot study is 1) to assess the total number of communication failures that occur with a person during a single day and 2) to determine the dependence of communication failure frequency on the communication settings and conditions. The main result of the study is a qualitative and quantitative assessment of communication failures during a subjects's day. The research is based on a special experiment based on 24-hour monitoring of the subject's speech and his subsequent retrospective commentary on all recorded data. Such an approach allows one to reduce the subjectivity inherent in much linguistic work. The research continues a series of studies devoted to the effectiveness of spoken communication and is important not only for understanding the fundamental processes of speech perception but is also crucial for the development of artificial intelligence systems involving human-computer speech dialogue systems and for speech technologies of the next generation.

Avoidance of cognitive efforts as a risk factor in interaction

“…The impression of understanding is often false, and therefore, the phenomenon called common ground fallacy (Mustajoki, 2012), or defaulted presumptions (Macagno, 2017: 271), is common, especially in the home environment, where people pay little attention to the way they speak. This is one of the main reasons for the paradoxical claim that there is even more miscommunication in FD than in a conversation with foreigners (Ermakova and Zemskaya, 1993; Mustajoki, 2017; Mustajoki et al, 2021; cf. however: Cruz, 2014).…”