Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication: Introduction and Overview

Any utterance, from a simple “uh huh” to an hour-long lecture, is the complex output of a variety of psychological processes—formulating what to say, selecting the right words, monitoring the effects of the message on the audience, and so forth (Levelt, 1989). Likewise, any act of message interpretation is based on both psycholinguistic processes (e.g., lexical retrieval, syntactic processing) and social-interactional factors such as beliefs about what a speaker is trying to achieve by his or her message (Gernsbacher, 1994). Historically, the social aspects of language use have fallen in the domain of social psychology, and the underlying psycholinguistic mechanisms have been the purview of cognitive psychology. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly clear that these components of language use are highly interrelated: Cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension interact with social psychological factors—such as beliefs about interlocutors and politeness norms—and with the dynamics of the conversation itself, to produce shared meaning. This realization has led to an exciting body of research examining how social and cognitive aspects of language use interact to affect interpersonal communication and to substantial progress in understanding the content and processes underlying language use. This volume aims to show that the cross-fertilization of theories and findings from social and cognitive psychology has proved extremely fruitful for understanding many aspects of human language use. Each of the four sections of the book illustrates this theme as it applies to such topics as people’s intentions or goals when using language, the role of language in research settings, indirect and figurative language, perspective-taking and conversational interaction, and the relationship between language and cognition. In this chapter, we first discuss the scope and aims of the book. Then, we outline some basic themes and historical influences on the work presented in the ensuing chapters. As will be seen, many of these influences arise from fields other than psychology—ordinary language philosophy, conversational analysis,