Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Understand and Use Language?
Connect structural priming with a theory of people adapting to one another. Examine where automatic alignment could help and where reasoning about a partner's knowledge may still be needed.
A question to consider. Two people repeatedly use the same phrase but fail to complete a joint task. What observation would distinguish misaligned meanings from incompatible goals?
Why this reading
Conversation requires people to produce and understand language together. Pickering and Garrod propose that alignment between their representations makes this coordination easier. Their account connects laboratory priming effects to the larger problem of shared understanding.
Before you read
Interlocutors are participants in a conversation. Alignment means using sufficiently similar representations, which can concern sounds, grammatical forms, or the situation discussed. Common ground concerns information treated as shared. Priming is one proposed route to alignment; repair addresses a detected misunderstanding.
Read for
- Trace the proposed connection from alignment at one level to alignment at others. Separate evidence for repeated forms from evidence for shared meanings.
- Compare automatic alignment and implicit common ground with deliberate reasoning about another person's knowledge.
- Ask how misunderstanding, different perspectives, and conflicting goals could reveal limits of the account.
Consider afterwards
- Two people use the same label for different locations on a map. What has aligned, what has not, and what exchange would reveal the mismatch?
Editorial context
The selected work is the target article, a theoretical proposal supported by several research traditions. Alignment is not agreement, and linguistic similarity does not ensure successful communication. The proposal's claims about how routinely people use common ground are contestable; Clark and Brennan's optional chapter offers a complementary account of establishing understanding through joint action.