Universal patterns for the "repair" of human communication discovered
Thursday, September 17, 2015 - 05:34
in Psychology & Sociology
When people talk to each other, there are plenty of opportunities for communication problems to occur. Sometimes we don't hear individual words correctly, at other times, contexts are not clear. Or we are unsure if we have understood the essential message. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen has now discovered mechanisms that people worldwide use to clarify confusion in conversation, thereby 'repairing' communication.