Coordinating social action: A primer for the cross-species investigation of communicative repair

Human joint action is inherently cooperative, manifested in the collaborative efforts of participants to minimize communicative trouble through interactive repair. Although interactive repair requires sophisticated cognitive abilities, it can be dissected into basic building blocks shared with nonhuman animal species. A review of the primate literature shows that interactionally contingent signal sequences are at least common among species of nonhuman great apes, suggesting a gradual evolution of repair. To pioneer a cross-species assessment of repair this paper aims at (i) identifying necessary precursors of human interactive repair; (ii) proposing a coding framework for its comparative study in humans and nonhuman species; and (iii) using this framework to analyse examples of interactions of humans (adults/children) and nonhuman great apes. We hope this paper will serve as a primer for cross-species comparisons on dealing with communicative breakdowns