Communication in High Risk Environments

Eine Zigarre rauchen, Zeitung lesen und sich am Kopf kratzen, das kann man gleichzeitig - und zwar mühelos, konstatiert John Searle. Ein Auto im Dunkeln in eine enge Parklücke rangieren und zugleich dem Beifahrer erklären, wo die Opernkarten sind, ist heikel und mehr als heikel, wenn die Ouvertüre schon begonnen hat.Dass die Sprachverwendung, produktiv und perzeptiv, eine anspruchsvolle kognitive Aktivität ist, zeigt sich, wenn das kognitive System gleichzeitig andere anspruchsvolle Leistungen durchführt. Dann vermindert sich die Leistung, die eine oder die andere oder beide.Die Frage nach der sprachliche Performanz unter so genannten Doppelaufgabenbedingungen ist für die Sprachforschung so spannend wie ungewohnt. Antworten darauf sind nicht nur von akademischem Interesse. Im Cockpit eines Linienjets, am Operationstisch und in der Leitwarte eines Kernkraftwerks verursacht eingeschränkte Kommunikationsleistung unmittelbare Gefahr.In diesem Heft berichten u.a. Linguisten und Psycholinguisten (Krifka, Dietrich), Human-Factors-Experten (Helmreich, Sexton), Arbeitspsychologen (Grote, Sträter) über Prinzipien der Sprachverwendung unter Aufgabendruck und Zeitdruck.Abstracts:Using Language in the Cockpit: Relationships with Workload and PerformanceJ. Bryan Sexton & Robert L. HelmreichFew events attract as much international attention as an accident involving a commercial jumbo jet airplane. The public, the airlines, the airplane manufacturers, and particularly the friends and family of passengers demand answers. The work presented here illustrates the importance of flight deck communication in flight safety through a simulator study of how and what pilots communicate. This investigation utilized a computer-based linguistic method of text analysis as well as a micro-coding of communication content. Analyses of simulator transcripts demonstrated that several language dimensions were associated with higher performance, fewer errors, and better communication. The ways in which pilots used language varied as a function of crew position and level of workload. Additionally, language use in the first flight of a crew pairing was associated with performance in subsequent flights.Group Interaction in the Cockpit: Some Linguistic FactorsManfred Krifka, Silka Martens, and Florian SchwarzFor a number of years it has been recognized that the social dynamics of group interaction is an import factor in the origin of accidents and in the way how accidents or accident-prone situations are handled in aviation (cf. Helmreich 1997a, 1997b). Factors related to interpersonal communication have been implicated in up to 80% of all aviation accidents over the past 20 years. As a reaction to this, Crew Resource Management (CRM) has been developed with the goal of rating and improving crew performance in aviation and in other fields in which professional groups interact in situations of high taskload and potential risk (cf. Helmreich ea. 1999). As far as this can be estimated at all, installing CRM techniques in the major American and European airlines has resulted in a definite improvement in the safety of commercial aviation. In spite of this success of CRM, practitioners in the field feel that, beyond the general social dynamics of group interaction, there might be potential problems relating to language and communication in such settings.In this article, we first summarize some aspects of previous research in this area. Then we report findings from a project that one of us, Manfred Krifka, has carried out, using transcripts of flight simulator sessions with pilots of a commercial American airline. We will discuss some of the problems of this project. Finally, we describe an ongoing continuation of that project that uses flight simulator sessions with pilots of a commercial German airline.