Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems

RESEARCH ARTICLE Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems Mark Dingemanse1*, Seán G. Roberts1, Julija Baranova1, Joe Blythe2, Paul Drew3, Simeon Floyd1, Rosa S. Gisladottir1, Kobin H. Kendrick1, Stephen C. Levinson1,4,5, Elizabeth Manrique1, Giovanni Rossi1, N. J. Enfield1,5,6* 1 Language & Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2 School of Language and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, 3 Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, United Kingdom, 4 Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 5 Donders Institute, PB 9104, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 6 Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia * (MD): (NJE) Abstract OPEN ACCESS Citation: Dingemanse M, Roberts SG, Baranova J, Blythe J, Drew P, Floyd S, et al. (2015) Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0136100. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0136100 Editor: Sonja Kotz, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, GERMANY Received: May 11, 2015 Accepted: July 29, 2015 Published: September 16, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Dingemanse et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files (S1–S6 Text, S1 Data). There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world’s languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of ‘other-initiated repair’, where the recipient of an unclear message can signal trouble and the sender can repair the original message. We find that this system is frequently used (on average about once per 1.4 minutes in any language), and that it has detailed common properties, contrary to assumptions of radical cultural variation. Unrelated languages share the same three functionally distinct types of repair initiator for signalling problems and use them in the same kinds of contexts. People prefer to choose the type that is the most specific possible, a principle that minimizes cost both for the sender being asked to fix the problem and for the dyad as a social unit. Disruption to the conversation is kept to a minimum, with the two-utterance repair sequence being on average no longer that the single utterance which is being fixed. The findings, controlled for historical relationships, situation types and other dependencies, reveal the fundamentally cooperative nature of human communication and offer support for the pragmatic universals hypothesis: while languages may vary in the organization of grammar and meaning, key systems of language use may be largely similar across cultural groups. They also provide a fresh perspective on controversies about the core properties of language, by revealing a common infrastructure for social interaction which may be the universal bedrock upon which linguistic diversity rests. Funding: This research was supported by ERC projects HSSLU (240853, to NJE) and INTERACT (269484, to SCL) and by the Max Planck Gesellschaft. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0136100 September 16, 2015 1 / 15 Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems Introduction A design requirement for a communication system with complex, varying content, is that when communication fails there should be some mechanism to ‘repair’ it. This paper investigates a key system of communication repair found in the core ecological niche for language, conversation [1,2]. We compare conversation in 12 languages from 5 continents and find a robust system for the real-time resolution of breakdowns in communication. We find that this system of other-initiated repair is frequently used, that its basic structure is the same across languages, and that its principles of usage reveal the fundamentally cooperative nature of human communication. In other-initiated repair, a recipient of a linguistic message signals that there is a problem understanding or hearing what was said, and the sender then ‘fixes’ it. Aspects of this system have been described for English [3–10], but no broad-ranging, systematic cross-cultural comparison has been made. Comparative work is important for two reasons. First, methods for recovery from communication problems vary radically across species. Non-human animal communication systems feature re-doings, detection of unreliable signals, and failures of communication being allowed to stand or inferred later [11–14], but there appear to be few if any mechanisms for the interactive recognition and repair of breakdowns. If cross-cultural investigation revealed a basic set of mechanisms for interactive repair in human language, this would shed new light on human capacities for language, and provide a key point of comparison for the cross-species ethology of communication. A second reason for systematic comparison is the common assumption of cross-cultural variation within our species: “While clarification is a universal activity, the manner in which clarification is accomplished varies crossculturally” [15,16]. Different languages may offer different ways to solve communication problems; or there may be a common toolbox of techniques, with not all languages using all of the tools. Work in interactional linguistics has suggested that in the domain of self-initiated repair, interactional practices are constrained by the syntactic organisation of a language [17]; this raises the question to what extent strategies for other-initiated repair may be language-specific. Yet there are also arguments in favour of a universal system. While languages may vary in fundamental ways, from sound systems to syntax to semantics [18,19], recent work has shown robust universal features in the basic infrastructure for social interaction, for instance the turn-taking system [20,21]. Likewise, practices of other-initiated repair may be so crucial to the organisation of social interaction and the achievement of joint goals that there remains little room for radical cross-cultural variation [1,2,22,23]. As one account proposes, “It is hard to imagine a society or culture whose organization of repair does not include a repair component, and one that works more or less like the one I have sketched” [1]. This generates two opposing hypotheses: a pragmatic diversity hypothesis, by which systems of language use reflect cultural differences and t (...truncated)