Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the search for an understanding of human communication,researchers often try to isolate listener and speaker roles andstudy them separately. Others claim that it is the intertwined-ness of these roles that makes human communication special.This close relationship between listener and speaker has beencharacterized by concepts such as common ground, backchan-neling, and alignment, but they are only part of the picture. Un-derlying these processes, there must be a mechanism for mak-ing inferences about our interlocutors’ understanding of wordsand gestures that allows us to communicate robustly and effi-ciently without assuming that we take the same words to havethe same meaning. In this paper, I explore this relationship be-tween language and concepts and propose an interactive mech-anism that can facilitate these latent conceptual inferences. Fi-nally, I show how this proposal paves the way for a more pre-cise account of the role of interaction in communication.