The Hidden Process Between Understanding and Expression in Human Communication

This paper is the second in a two-part research program. Paper I, Compensation Without Recovery, proposed that an unresolved difficulty in oral social communication can trigger a compensatory shift toward alternative channels, and that the success of a substitute channel can obscure — rather than resolve — the original deficit. Paper II turns to that deficit directly and asks what, structurally, is failing when oral communication fails. This paper introduces the concept of bayan, a term used here to denote the complete recursive process through which internal meaning becomes shared meaning — not one stage among others, but the name of the whole cyclical process itself. That process has a recurring structure: an Input of understanding drawn from the other and the situation, a Process that transforms this understood meaning into meaning ready to be communicated, an Output through which that meaning is expressed, and the other's response, which becomes a New Input that restarts the cycle. A difficulty presenting as an oral-communication deficit need not originate at the Output stage — the ability to produce words — but can originate at Input, at Process, or in the failure of a response to be received as new Input. Drawing on Levelt's model of speech production, Clark and Brennan's account of grounding in communication, Vygotsky's account of inner speech, and Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson's interactional axioms, this paper argues that low-friction substitute channels — including conversational AI — systematically exercise some parts of the bayan cycle while allowing others to go untested, and that fluent output through such a channel is not evidence that the full cycle has been exercised. Conversational AI is treated throughout as one instance of a substitute channel among others, illustrative of the underlying mechanism rather than its object.