Susan No nails to nail into the wall

Abstract:  When two people communicate successfully, they each come to the belief that they are talking about the same things, and their individual mental representations seem to converge. How does this happen? Perhaps the simplest explanation is that as long as both speaker and addressee are rational, cooperative, and following the same linguistic conventions, understanding emerges serendipitously. As Sperber and Wilson (1986, 41) have stated, "Clearly, if people share cognitive environments, it is because they share physical environments and have similar cognitive abilities. " This explanation for how speakers and addressees come to believe they are talking about the same thing emphasizes the ways their abilities, environments, and language processes are similar. Not only are two individuals in conversation likely to share some of the same biases, but the processes of production and comprehension themselves likely share the same resources. That is, what is easy for an individual to understand is often easy for that individual to produce (Brown and Dell 1986; Dell and Brown 1991). A second sort of explanation of how people achieve shared mental representations emphasizes the interactive coordirration of meaning, above and beyond speakers using encoding rules that match addressees ' decoding rules. In other words, successful com-munication depends not only on conventions about the content of messages, but also on a metalinguistic process by which conversational partners interactively exchange evidence about what they intend and understand. This is not to say that similar abili-ties and biases play no role in successful communication, but that these are often not sulpicictlt to achieve shared mental representations. Consider this episode of a sponta-neous face-to-face conversation: Susan: You don't have any nails, do you?