Communicating with One Another / Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics (PDF)

The authors are experimental psychologists who have been engaged in research together for 40 years now. Dan O'Connell studied at St. Louis University and did doctoral work at the University of Illinois (Champaign/Urbana), Sabine Kowal studied at the Free University of Berlin and did doctoral work at St. Louis University. O'Connell's career was at St. Louis, Loyola of Chicago, and Georgetown Universities, while Kowal's was at both the Technical University of Berlin and the Anna Freud Oberschule in Berlin. For many years, the team was oriented toward mainstream psycholinguistics and experimental research on speech production. Throughout the last decades of the 20th century, their interest shifted to spontaneous spoken discourse under field observational conditions. This shift had as its origin their observation that professional speakers known for their eloquence in public dialogue violate both ideal delivery and syntactic well-formedness - concepts established in mainstream psycholinguistics as norms for effective communication. O'Connell and Kowal have ascribed the use of these norms to a written language bias and have accordingly turned their attention - both empirically and theoretically -- to the use of genuine spoken discourse. Radio and TV political interviews have provided much of the empirical data base for their recent research, and their emphasis on spontaneous spoken discourse has led to the investigation of neglected speech phenomena such as fillers, pauses, interjections, and laughter in both English- and German-language corpora.

"A unique view of language studies throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries: where the mainstream emphasis has been, what has been missing, and what remedies are needed.  In other words, this book is a call for a paradigm shift in the study of oral communication.  It is a must read for people interested in language use, as well as for specialists in language studies."

-Camelia Suleiman, Ph.D., Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

"O’Connell and Kowal have done the field of psychology a great favor by rescuing the rich human experience of language use and allowing it to live and breathe in its natural habitat. The authors have identified crucial theoretical and methodological assumptions that have hampered scholarship on language use. Their critical assessment is grounded in nuanced theoretical analysis and rigorous empirical studies. As a result, they reveal the complexity, elegance, and moral aspects of day to day dialogical communication. For the research community, the authors’ theoretical pillars of intersubjectivity, perspectivity, open-endedness, and verbal integrity provide a needed context for evaluating and planning research on language use. For general psychology, these same four concepts permit a view of language as a domain in which to study people’s interests and the tools they use to pursue them. For the rest of us, O’Connell and Kowal’s book provides an opportunity to marvel at both the folly and dignity of the human condition."

-Kevin P. Weinfurt, Ph.D., Duke University, Durham, NC, USA