Alignment in Communication

Book excerpt: Alignment in Communication is a novel direction in communication research, which focuses on interactive adaptation processes assumed to be more or less automatic in humans. It offers an alternative to established theories of human communication and also has important implications for human-machine interaction. A collection of articles by international researchers in linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, and social robotics, this book provides evidence on why such alignment occurs and the role it plays in communication. Complemented by a discussion of methodologies and explanatory frameworks from dialogue theory, it presents cornerstones of an emerging new theory of communication. The ultimate purpose is to extend our knowledge about human communication, as well as creating a foundation for natural multimodal dialogue in human-machine interaction. Its cross-disciplinary nature makes the book a useful reference for cognitive scientists, linguists, psychologists, and language philosophers, as well as engineers developing conversational agents and social robots.