Language as Social Action

How Communicating Aligns Minds

By: Jessica Gasiorek, Howard Giles (Editor), R. Kelly Aune

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16 December 2020

At a Glance

No. of Pages
186

Edition Type
New edition

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.91

$126.45

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Winner of the Jake Harwood Outstanding Book Award (2022).

What, exactly, is understanding? And how do people create, maintain, and manipulate states of understanding via communication? This book addresses these questions, drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in cognitive science, communication, psychology, and pragmatics. Rejecting classic descriptions of communication as "sending and receiving messages," this book proposes a novel perspective that depicts communication as a process in which interactants construct, test, and refine mental modes of a joint experience on the basis of the meme states (mental representations) activated by stimuli in social interactions. It explains how this process, when successful, results in interactants'' mental models aligning, or becoming entrained—in other words, in creating a state of understanding. This framework is grounded in a set of foundational observations about evolved human cognition that highlight people''s intrinsic social orientation, predisposition toward efficiency, and use of predictive interference-making. These principles are also used to explain how codified systems ("codes") emerge in extended or repeated interactions in which people endeavor to create understanding. Integrating and synthesizing research across disciplines, this book offers communication scholars and students a theoretical framework that will transform the way they see understanding, communication, and social connection.

Industry Reviews

"Gasiorek and Aune brilliantly tackle the Communication discipline's most central yet (ironically) most misunderstood problem: how is it that we do this thing we call communication? Creating Understanding has totally changed my understanding of understanding. This insightful work is a must read for those interested in the social science of communication."-Timothy R. Levine, Author, Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Science of Lying and Deception; Professor, University of Alabama at Birmingham

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