Do we notice when communication goes awry? An investigation of people's sensitivity to coherence in spontaneous conversation.

ABSTRACT: In the dominant theoretical framework, human communication is modeled as the faithful transmission of information. This implies that when people are involved in communicational exchanges, they should be sensitive to the success with which information is transmitted, easily detecting when conversations lack coherence. The expectation that humans are good at detecting conversational incoherence is in line with common intuition, but there are several reasons to suspect that it might be unrealistic. First, similar intuitions have been shown to be unrealistic for a number of psychological processes. Second, faithful information transmission may conflict with other conversational goals. Third, mechanisms supporting information transmission may themselves lead to cases of incoherence being missed

SUBMITTER: Galantucci B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4114551 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature