Repair: The Interface Between Interaction and Cognition

Abstract

Conversational repair is the process people use to detect and resolve problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding. Through repair, participants in social interaction display how they establish and maintain communication and mutual understanding. We argue that repair provides a crucial theoretical interface for research between diverse approaches to studying human interaction. We provide an overview of conversation analytic findings about repair in order to encourage further cross-disciplinary research involving both detailed inductive inquiry and more theory-driven experimental approaches. We outline CA's main typologies of repair and its methodological rationale, and we provide transcripts and examples that readers can explore for themselves using open data from online corpora. Since participants in interaction use repair to deal with problems as they emerge at the surface level of talk, we conclude that repair can be a point of convergence for studying mis/communication from multiple methodological perspectives.

Editors' Introduction: Miscommunication

“…They are primarily analyzed in terms of where in the sequence of turns in a conversation trouble is signaled, who (nominally) produced the source of the trouble, who responded to it, and where in the sequence it is resolved. Albert and de Ruiter () and Purver, Hough, and Howes () provide examples and further explanation of these structures.…”

“…However, the most developed empirical account of what happens when things go wrong comes from conversation analysis (CA), a sociological tradition built on detailed qualitative analyses of natural interaction (Sacks, ). For reasons that are explored further below, the relationship between conversation analysis and cognitive science is not straightforward (see also De Ruiter & Albert, ; and the discussion by Albert & de Ruiter, ) but it has had a significant influence on work in mainstream cognitive science (viz: Clark & Marshall, ; Levelt, ; Levinson, ; Hutchins, ; Healey, ) and is a key reference point for all the papers in this volume.…”

Improving Human Interaction Research through Ecological Grounding

“…These cross-disciplinary initiatives build on the successful model of 'naturalistic experiments' (Heath & Luff, 2017) exemplified here by Heritage et al (2007). This article aims to encourage many more such cross-overs by providing an overview of key research procedures that can work as practical methodological interfaces between conversation analytic and experimental methods for human interaction research within psychology and cognitive science (Albert & de Ruiter, 2018;De Jaegher, Peräkylä, & Stevanovic, 2016;De Ruiter & Albert, 2017). 9 In this paper we have suggested that researchers in the field of human interaction can enhance the reproducibility and reliability of their findings by grounding their theories in the details of the interactional ' context of discovery'.…”

Improving human interaction research through ecological grounding (in press at Collabra)

“…This article aims to encourage many more such cross-overs by providing an overview of key research procedures that can work as practical, methodological interfaces between conversation analytic and experimental methods for studying human interaction within psychology and cognitive science (Albert & de Ruiter, 2018;De Jaegher, Peräkylä, & Stevanovic, 2016;De Ruiter & Albert, 2017) 9 In this paper we have suggested that researchers in the field of human interaction can enhance the reproducibility and reliability of their findings by grounding their theories in the details of the interactional 'context of discovery'. To achieve this, we recommend researchers devote attention and resources to exploring this context in an empirically constrained way by limiting their theorizing to phenomena and resources that are observable to both analysts and participants.…”