Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

As problems of understanding arise in conversational interaction, we must find a means to indicate to our interlocutorthe reason for our misunderstanding. However, we are simultaneously constrained by social interactive practices that limit facethreat and adhere to epistemic rights. Thus, the challenge is to communicate our own misunderstanding - as specifically aspossible - while avoiding explicitness. This challenge may be increased in contexts of language emergence in which alignmentis necessary to promote communicative efficiency and conventionalization. Participants in novel communication tasks reliedon certain gesture-driven other-initiated repair strategies to gain interactive alignment. The embodied display of cognitive andinteractive misalignment cues the interlocutor to repair in a way that reflects their own understanding of the repair initiation andtrouble source. The breakdown of intersubjectivity - and its subsequent re-building - is observed in the negotiation of evolvingsignal-meaning matches through interactive repair sequences.