Sumana

Good question. I mean .... Let's say there is deterministic communication, where both sides only consider the transaction a success if the speaker and recipient are both pretty sure the recipient has received the message, and they usually check whether success is likely, and if it seems unlikely, then that's a problem that needs fixing. And if the speaker starts to say something, and then gets interrupted, speaker or recipient notice that and prioritize coming back to that interrupted communication once the interruption is finished/put aside. And so, once a thing is said and understood, repetition does not happen much, or causes annoyance when it does happen.

And then there is probabilistic communication, where it's more ok if some individual sentences/questions get dropped/misunderstood/interrupted and never followed up on/answered, because over time the group will collectively remember/repeat stuff and ... I guess the state of everyone's head will be eventually consistent.

I'm sure there are linguistics concepts including Gricean maxims that apply to all this.