We understand each other

Marja-Leena Sorjonen: The Centre of Excellence in Intersubjectivity in Interaction

The world may be lacking in peace and love but we have plenty of mutual understanding even though its birth mechanisms are at times both complex and inconspicuous. Marja-Leena Sorjonen, professor of Finnish language, gives an example.

When a patient tells her physician that she cannot afford the proposed private physiotherapy right at this moment, the physician knows how to nod and say “yes” only after the patient has said “right at this moment”. In this way, the physician receives the patient’s sensitive explanation and, with one well-timed word, expresses that he understands that it is a question of a merely temporary situation.

What if the physician had nodded immediately when the patient had said that she cannot afford the physiotherapy? Or if the physician said nothing, how would that make the patient feel?

Mutual understanding between people depends on these minor details and yet most of the time we understand what the other person means.

The Centre of Excellence in Intersubjectivity in Interaction led by Sorjonen studies how understanding is reached on what is being done (by studying, for example, requests and responses to them, complaints, asking for and giving advice), what kinds of verbal and non-verbal means are used to achieve understanding and how emotions are expressed in interaction.

The 45 researcher strong unit is multidisciplinary as well as multilingual: it contains linguists and social scientists and researchers of Finnish, Swedish and other Nordic languages as well as researchers of English and Estonian.

– You could think that general means interaction is common to all. But what are the specific means in different languages? asks Sorjonen.

A key tool of the centre’s researchers is conversation analysis, which is used to analyse interactive situations from audio and video recordings. It has been used to study, for example, customer service situations at R-kioski outlets and Kela – The Social Insurance Institution of Finland.

The centre has at its disposal approximately 700 hours of audio and video recordings on a variety of interactive situations. The recordings include conversations between friends, family members and acquaintances, customer service situations and clinical situations. There are also situations where the participants have different competencies: some of the participants may not be native speakers or are aphasics.

– For a long time, conversation analysis was based on research into the English language. Now the field has started to open up and comparative research has become increasingly central. I don’t know any Japanese but I am still immensely interested in research in it, says Sorjonen.

According to her, the researchers at the Centre of Excellence conduct basic research with numerous application opportunities. Knowledge of how mutual understanding is constructed may help, for example, in the education of healthcare or international commerce professionals as well as when teaching Finnish as a foreign language.

Centre of Excellence in Intersubjectivity in Interaction

Text: Tuomo Tamminen
Photo: Mika Federley
Translation: AAC Global