The comparison of repair in German and American conversations shows that this mechanism to re-establish mutual understanding, is both context-free and context-sensitive: on the one hand its systematicity holds true across these two languages, on the other hand language-specific morphological features, syntactic structures and grammatical congruity across turns play an interactive role in repair. A second context-sensitive side of repair lies in the selection of the German repair-initiator BITTE, which is found to spur establishment of mutual gaze.