Gert Rickheit – författare

This handbook focuses on new theoretical challenges associated with process-oriented psycholinguistics.

Speech acts are embedded in situations that may vary in a multitude of parameters. Speech production and comprehension necessarily have to be both robust and flexible. Flexibility includes that speakers vary in speed, articulation, choice of words and interaction style, depending on specific context conditions. There is need of theoretical approaches that do not exclusively stick to ideals such as grammaticality and coherence - which collapse when confronted with irregularities - but are robust enough to deal with irregularities and disruptions.

The handbook describes different methods of analyzing or reconstructing variants and options of language use. The articles contain transcriptions of spontaneous speech as well as experimentally verified studies. The same holds for simulation techniques modelling partial processes and evaluating their efficiency. There are no restrictions with respect to theoretical starting points - modelling of speech acts by neuronal networks as well as rule-based knowledge of representation are both covered in the book. The languages of publication are German and English.

This volume presents important results of the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) "Situated Artificial Communicators," which was funded by grants from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for more than twelve years.

The contributions focus on different aspects of human-human and human-machine interaction in situations which closely model everyday workplace demands. The authors are linguists, psycho- und neurolinguists, psychologists and computer scientists at Bielefeld University. They jointly tackle questions of information processing in task-oriented communication. The role of key notions such as context, integration (of multimodal information), reference, coherence, and robustness is explored in great depth.

Some remarkable findings and recurrent phenomena reveal that communication is, to a large extent, a matter of joint activity. The interdisciplinary approach integrates theory, description and experimentation with simulation and evaluation.

In our everyday life, communicative processes are relevant in almost all situations. It is important to know whether you should say something which is adequate in the situation or whether it is better to say nothing at all. Communicative competence is fundamental for a successful life in our society as it is of great importance for all areas of life. Therefore, it is not surprising that communicative competence is the subject of many theoretical and empirical approaches and, in consequence, research on this topic is diverse. We focus our contributions on linguistic aspects of communication. In the centre of interest are linguistic oriented performances of different forms of communicative competence, language acquisition, and language disorders. The topics of this book concern the description of methods for studying language in the brain, the interaction between language and cognition, discourse acquisition of children, literacy acquisition and its precursors, the use and acquisition of the sign language, models and training of writing and reading, nonverbal communicative competence, media competence, communication training, developmental dyslexia, the treatment of stuttering, and the description of language disorders.