Two Minds, One Dialog: Coordinating Speaking and Understanding

In this chapter, we consider communication as a joint activity in which two or more interlocutors share or synchronize aspects of their private mental states and act together in the world. We summarize key experimental evidence from our own and others' research on how speakers and addressees take one another into account while they are processing language. Under some circumstances, production and comprehension are adjusted to a partner's perspective or characteristics in the early moments of processing, in a flexible and probabilistic fashion. We advocate studying the coordination and integration of cognitive products and processes both between and within the minds of interlocutors. We then discuss recent evidence from electrophysiology and imaging studies (relevant to Theory of Mind and to mirroring) that has begun to illuminate brain networks that underlie the coordination of joint and individual processing during communication.