Language Feedback
22-23 May 2025, University of Cologne
Feedback is a notion that is central to interaction, ranging from a nod, furrowed brow or minimal interjection (‘huh?’) during dyadic conversation to ways of mediating and moderating communication in corporate culture. It is omnipresent in interpersonal communication processes and reflects interlocutors’ perception and monitoring of the success (or potential failure) of communication. It is also crucial for determining community membership, common ground and shared experience. During communicative interaction, interactants periodically assure themselves in order to move forward in their communicative exchange. As such, interlocutors look for evidence of understanding in their conversation partners – with feedback constituting a major mechanism for signaling such understanding.
Given its centrality, feedback can provide us with a window into the mechanisms of human communicative interaction, allowing us to investigate how the dynamics of the communicative act are affected by the variability between individuals, languages, and settings.
The upcoming LingCologne2025 is dedicated to exploring Feedback in Language. This conference will serve as a platform to present cutting-edge research on various dimensions of feedback, aiming to identify connections across different concepts and applications. The focus will be on multimodal feedback including vocal, manual and non-manual feedback mechanisms, utilized by both speakers and signers (Bauer et al 2023; Bauer et al, in prep). To guide the discussions, we have identified four key themes related to feedback. LingCologne2025 will feature presentations by eight of the world’s leading researchers in these four themes, promoting a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role of feedback in language.
Backchannels
The concept of ‘backchannel’, first introduced by Yngve (1970), refers to the subtle signals recipients produce in order to demonstrate attention, understanding, or agreement without interrupting the current signer or speaker. Research in this area has expanded to include both lexical (e.g., ‘okay,’ ‘I see’) , non-lexical (e.g. ‘mm’) (Gardner 2001) and visual (e.g., nodding, smiling) backchannels (Mesch 2016), with a focus on their roles in turn-taking, recipient engagement, timing, function, and linguistic/cultural variations.
Alignment
Building on the framework established by Pickering and Garrod (2004), this theme investigates how interactants match their interlocutors’ linguistic and non-linguistic behaviors. This phenomenon has been shown to take place not only at various linguistic levels, but also in the use of visual cues as smiles and laughter in conversation (Ludusan & Wagner 2022; Kuder & Bauer 2024).
Repair
This theme explores the strategies interactants employ to deal with misunderstandings and errors in conversation, such as through clarification requests and self-repairs. Repair strategies are vital for maintaining the flow of interaction, and research in this area has broadened our understanding of self-repair, other-initiated repair, and the management of turn-taking during these processes (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks, 1977). Recent studies show that the morpho-syntactic organization of each language influences the self-repair strategies employed. For instance, English, Hebrew, and German exhibit distinct patterns in recycling and replacement repairs (Fox et 2010). Sign languages, like spoken languages, also employ a conventionalized set of linguistic resources to indicate perceptual and understanding problems (Manrique, 2016).
Turns
Turn-taking and the timing of turn transitions are critical components of effective communication. Sometimes long pauses are relevant, especially when misunderstanding is being signaled (Mertens and De Ruiter, 2021). Sometimes people overlap in conversation without an apparent reason. The time between successive turns is known to be very short— much shorter than what can be explained by simple reactions to a turn ending (De Ruiter, 2019). Recent studies have shown that turn-taking behavior, such as the timing of responses, significantly influences perceived fluency ratings, with differences observed between native and nonnative speech. For example, overly eager or reluctant responses can impact fluency ratings differently in native versus nonnative speech contexts (Van Os et al. 2020). Beyond feedback, this research theme explores broader implications in areas such as human-computer interaction, second language learning, or cross-cultural communication.
