Carving language for social coordination
Human social coordination is often mediated by language. Through verbal dialogue, people direct each other’s attention to properties of their shared environment, they discuss how to jointly solve problems, share their introspections, and distribute roles and assignments. In this
article, we propose a dynamical framework for the study of the coordinative role of language. Based on a review of a number of recent experimental studies, we argue that shared symbolic patterns emerge and stabilize through a process of local reciprocal linguistic alignment. Such patterns
in turn come to facilitate and refine social coordination by enabling the alignment, joint construction and navigation of conceptual models and actions. Implications of the framework are illustrated and discussed in relation to a case study where dyads of interlocutors interact verbally to
reach joint decisions in a perceptual discrimination task. Keywords: social coordination; language; communication; linguistic alignment; symbolic patterns; affordances; emergence; evolution; adaptivity; interaction
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 January 2012
- Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content