Communication Failure
李算
Francesca M. Bosco and Maurizio Tirassa
循环呼吸法
Università di Torino
Dipartimento di Psicologia & Centro di Scienza Cognitiva
樱花画法
via Po, 14
10123 Torino (Italy)
email *****************.it, *******************.it
Successful小学教资面试 communication is to be defined in terms of the partner’s recognition of a particular t of mental states of the speaker, in whom there is the intention to achieve such an effect on the partner (Grice 1989). Within this perspective, communication failure may be defined as an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the speaker to modify the partner’s mental states in the desired way. Failure repair then is a new attempt to produce the intended communicative effect. Traditionally, a major rearch perspective on the topic has been 野外求生记conversation analysis (CA). However, communication failures have received little attention in recent years.
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Within a CA perspective, Schegloff et al. (1977) showed that a structural-bad preference for lf- versus other-initiation of repair exists in turn-taking after a breakdown (e also Zahn 1984). Friedland and Miller (1998) also found that in brain-injured patients over 80 per cent of repairs were lf-initiated. Fox and Jasperson (1995) classified different types of lf-repair bad on the operation included: repeating or recycling, repla
cing or substituting, adding or inrting, and abandoning or restarting. Self-repair is preferably initiated in the same turn where the trouble has occurred or in the ‘third turn to the trouble source turn’, i.e. the turn subquent to the one which follows the trouble source (Schegloff et al. 1977; but e also Schegloff 1992, 1997a). Self-repair may be carried out in respon to other-initiation of repair (Schegloff 2004). When the repair is initiated by the partner, it is almost always initiated in the turn that follows the trouble source (Schegloff 1997b). Robinson (2006) has argued that the ‘meaning’ of other-initiated forms of repair can affect the speaker’s respon. For example, if the trouble-source speaker understands himlf to be blameworthy for the breakdown, he is more likely to correct, rather than merely repeat, the trouble source, and to engage in other types of accounting behaviours, such as apologizing.
CA aims at a descriptive analysis of communication failures, which it views as breakdowns or trouble occurring during conversation. More recently, some authors have propod that a specific ca of communication failure,misunderstanding, be viewed as an integral part of the comprehension process rather than just a breakdown (Dascal 1985;
Weigand 1999). In line with such a perspective Bosco et al. (2006) have claimed that all communication failures, not only misunderstanding, integrally belong to the cooperative process (Grice 1957) in which agents are involved during communication. Within a cooperative model of communication, the replies received from a partner provide the speaker with the grounds on which to realize that a communicative attempt has failed. Recognizing that a failure has occurred provides in its turn a starting point for repair. Focusing on the complexity of the cognitive process involved in failure recognition and repair and following the assumptions of cognitive pragmatics theory (Airenti et al. 1993; Bara 2008), Bosco et al. (2006) have propod a taxonomy of the types of failures that may occur in communicative interaction. The are failure of the literal meaning, failure of the speaker’s meaning, and failure of the communicative effect (i.e. the partner’s refusal to accept a partner’s communication act). A failure may also involve a combination of two or all of the types. In order to achieve his or her communicative goal, and depending on the kind of failure that has occurred, a speaker may employ different repair strategies. A speaker may simply repeat what he or she said (in the ca
of failure of the expression act), reformulate what he or she said (in the ca of failure of the speaker’s meaning) or change the content of what he or she said (in the ca of failure of the communicative effect). This taxonomy allowed Bosco et al. (2006) to generate empirical hypothes about the relative difficulty of recognizing and repairing different kinds of failure that were confirmed by empirical evidence obtained from 3- to 8-year-old children. In particular, it was found that it was easier for children to repair a failure of literal meaning than a failure of speaker’s meaning, whereas repair of communicative effect was the most difficult.
From a cognitive and developmental pragmatics perspective it is uful to keep in mind children’s performance, since it can offer suggestions on the increasing difficulty in the production of a specific pragmatic task. Direct obrvations of children show that in the prelinguistic pha their recovery strategy is esntially to persist in repeating the failed communicative act (Alexander et al. 1997). U of this strategy tends to decrea as the child gets older (Garvey 1984) and becomes capable of distinguishing different types of failure and of adopting a fitting repair strategy (Marcos 1991). During the cond year of li
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fe children become able to perform two different kinds of verbal repair: repetition and modification. In particular, they just repeat their request when the adult replies with a neutral query. They give a more specific version of it in respon to a specific query from the adult (Anlmi et al. 1986) and reformulate it when the adult replies with a simple declarative comment (Wilcox and Webster 1980). Children also appear to adopt a repair strategy suitable to the type of failure that has occurred. When their mother misunderstands a request (rather than refus to comply with it), children try to clarify it rather than simply repeat it (Marcos and Kornhaber-le Chanu 1992). Thus, while repetition appears to be the easiest strategy for recovery, the u of more sophisticated and appropriate strategies appears to be an early acquisition.
A very early version of communication failure, rooted more in the failed realization of the infant’s expectation of a certain action on the part of the mother than in the actual failure of a communicative attempt on the part of the infant, has been claimed to play a role in the development of theory of mind (ToM) and Gricean communication (Tirassa et al. 2006). In general, the possible relation between ToM and the ability to recognize and rep
air communication failures appears to be a particularly interesting topic. It has been suggested that when an agent – be it a young child (Golinkoff 1986, 1993) or an adult (Feldman and Kalmar 1996) – repairs a communication failure, he or she usually adapts his or her strategy to take the partner’s perspective into account. In line with this hypothesis, children with autism, a condition which has been claimed to be associated with an impaired ToM (Baron-Cohen et al. 1985), appear to experience communication failures more frequently than their typically developing peers (e Keen 2003). However, Volden’s (2004) study of the problem yielded ambiguous results. On the one hand, children with隆姓 autism spectrum disorder (ASD) performed similarly to controls in responding to requests for clarification. They ud more flexible and increasingly complex repair strategies according to whether they had received a neutral request, a request for clarification, or a mistructured prompt (‘Tell me in another way’) from an interlocutor. On the other hand, ASD children also produced a greater number of inappropriate replies than the controls.
