Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication

The article reviews a volume collecting a series of papers related to aspects of interpersonal communication seen from social and cognitive angles. It was planned to solicit contributions discussing experiments on language use and understanding with the aim of illustrating the strength of experimental research on human communication. The main goal is to highlight the interaction between the cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production/speech comprehension and social factors such as politeness norms and beliefs about interlocutors. The book is divided into four sections. The first one (chapters 1-3) has an introductory character and provides the theoretical foundation of the book by expanding Grice's (1975) cooperative principle. The second section (chapters 4-6) focusses on nonliteral language and claims that it does not require more effort or time to understand than literal language. Section 3 (chapters 7-9) addresses how interlocutors take into account each other's perspectives when producing and interpreting messages. Section 4 (chapters 10-11) analyses the relationships among language, social interaction, and cognition.