William S. Horton

When do speakers take into account common ground

What role does common ground play in the production of utterances? We outline and test two models. One model assumes that common ground is involved in initial utterance planning, while the other model assumes that it only plays a role in monitoring. To compare these models, we focus on common ground as evidenced in physical co-presence. We had speakers describe objects for listeners in a modified version of the referential communication task. While descriptions under no time constraints appeared to incorporate common ground with the listener, common ground was not used when the speakers were under time pressure. These results suggest that speakers do not engage in audience design in the initial planning of utterances; instead, they monitor those plans for violations of common ground.

Conversational common ground and memory processes in language production

Speakers in conversation routinely engage in audience design. That is, they construct their utterances to be understood by particular addressees. Standard accounts of audience design have frequently appealed to the notion of common ground. On this view, speakers produce well-designed utterances by expressly considering the knowledge they take as shared with addressees. This article suggests that conversational common ground, rather than being a category of specialized mental representations, is more usefully conceptualized as an emergent property of ordinary memory processes. This article examines 2 separate but equally important processes: commonality assessment and message formation. Commonality assessment involves the retrieval of memory traces concerning what information is shared with an addressee, whereas message formation involves deciding how to use that information in conversation. Evidence from the CallHome English corpus of telephone conversations shows how each of these processes is rooted in basic aspects of human memory. The overall goal of this article is to demonstrate the need for a more cognitive psychological account of conversational common ground.

Speakers’ experiences and audience design: knowing when and knowing how to adjust utterances to addressees☆

Abstract In this paper, we develop an account of the types of experiences through which speakers learn to design their utterances for particular addressees. We argue that there are two important aspects of conversational situations relevant to considerations of audience design. First, speakers must become aware that audience design is necessary in the current setting. Second, they must frequently overcome other tendencies toward consistency and brevity of expression. To assess the impact of both of these factors, we conducted a referential communication experiment in which Directors described arrays of picture cards for two independent Matchers. In the early rounds, both Matchers were present and each possessed a different subset of the Directors’ cards. In later rounds, only one of the two Matchers was present at a time and worked with the entire set of cards. We evaluated the degree to which Directors’ descriptions showed evidence of audience design by focusing on critical rounds when the Directors described cards that the current Matcher had not previously shared. Directors generally appeared sensitive to the distinction between shared and nonshared items. Additionally, there was more evidence of adjustment at the second partner change, suggesting that the Directors had learned something about the kinds of descriptions required in this situation. Our results suggest that it is important to consider the nature of speakers’ experiences of interacting in a particular situation when making claims about the presence or absence of audience design.

Out of sight, out of mind: occlusion and the accessibility of information in narrative comprehension.

Do readers encode the perceptual perspectives of characters during narrative comprehension? To address this question, we conducted two experiments using stories that sometimes described situations in which certain information was occluded from the protagonists’ views. We generated two related hypotheses concerning the potential impact of occlusion events on text representations. One, theevent boundary hypothesis, suggested that any salient narrative event would reduce the accessibility of prior story information. The second, theperceptual availability hypothesis, suggested that accessibility would decrease most for information no longer visible to story protagonists. In Experiment 1, the participants were slowest to respond to verification questions that asked about occluded information. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that this effect did not extend to other, nonoccluded information. These results suggest that readers encode text information from the perceptual perspective of story protagonists. This is consistent with recent perceptual symbol views of language comprehension.

The Influence of Partner-Specific Memory Associations on Language Production: Evidence from Picture Naming.

In typical interactions, speakers frequently produce utterances that appear to reflect beliefs about the common ground shared with particular addressees. Horton and Gerrig (2005a) proposed that one important basis for audience design is the manner in which conversational partners serve as cues for the automatic retrieval of associated information from memory. This paper reports the results of two experiments demonstrating the influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production. Following an initial task designed to establish associations between specific words (Experiment 1) or object categories (Experiment 2) and each of two partners, participants named a series of pictures in the context of the same two individuals. Naming latencies were shortest for responses associated with the current partner, and were not significantly correlated with explicit recall of partner-item associations. Such partner-driven memory retrieval may constrain the information accessible to speakers as they produce utterances for particular addressees.

Pilgrims Sailing the Titanic: Plausibility Effects on Memory for Misinformation

People rely on information they read even when it is inaccurate (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, Journal of Memory and Language 49:519–536, 2003), but how ubiquitous is this phenomenon? In two experiments, we investigated whether this tendency to encode and rely on inaccuracies from text might be influenced by the plausibility of misinformation. In Experiment 1, we presented stories containing inaccurate plausible statements (e.g., “The Pilgrims’ ship was the Godspeed”), inaccurate implausible statements (e.g., . . . the Titanic), or accurate statements (e.g., . . . the Mayflower). On a subsequent test of general knowledge, participants relied significantly less on implausible than on plausible inaccuracies from the texts but continued to rely on accurate information. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results with the addition of a think-aloud procedure to elicit information about readers’ noticing and evaluative processes for plausible and implausible misinformation. Participants indicated more skepticism and less acceptance of implausible than of plausible inaccuracies. In contrast, they often failed to notice, completely ignored, and at times even explicitly accepted the misinformation provided by plausible lures. These results offer insight into the conditions under which reliance on inaccurate information occurs and suggest potential mechanisms that may underlie reported misinformation effects.

Prejudice Concerns and Race-Based Attentional Bias New Evidence From Eyetracking

The present study used eyetracking methodology to assess whether individuals high in external motivation (EM) to appear nonprejudiced exhibit an early bias in visual attention toward Black faces indicative of social threat perception. Drawing on previous work examining visual attention to socially threatening stimuli, the authors predicted that high-EM participants, but not lower-EM participants, would initially look toward Black faces and then subsequently direct their attention away from these faces. Participants viewed pairs of images, some of which consisted of one White and one Black male face, while a desk-mounted eyetracking camera recorded their eye movements. Results showed that, as predicted, high-EM, but not lower-EM, individuals exhibited patterns of visual attention indicative of social threat perception.

A Corpus Analysis of Patterns of Age-Related Change in Conversational Speech

Conversational speech from over 300 speakers from 17 to 68 years of age was analyzed for age-related changes in the timing and content of spoken language production. Overall, several relationships between the lexical content, timing, and fluency of speech emerged, such that more novel and lower frequency words were associated with slower speech and higher levels of disfluencies. Speaker age was associated with slower speech and more filled pauses, particularly those associated with lexical selection. Increasing age, however, was also associated with longer utterances and greater lexical diversity. On balance, these analyses present a picture of age-related changes in speech performance that largely support data obtained from controlled laboratory studies. However, particular patterns of age-related change may be moderated in conversational situations.

Metaphor and readers' attributions of intimacy.

Previous theorists have suggested that figurative language may be an especially salient means by which speakers and addressees establish and recognize specific feelings of interpersonal closeness. To explore readers’ sensitivity to this interpersonal function of figurative language use, brief stories were created that described interactions between two ambiguously related characters. In the course of these conversational narratives, one character always used either a metaphoric or literal referring expression to refer to some antecedent information from the story. Across three experiments, readers consistently judged these story characters as knowing each other better when their interactions contained metaphoric references. Moreover, this occurred even when addressees failed to give explicit evidence of having understood the critical expressions. To the extent that language use highlights assumptions about commonalities, readers may generate inferences about social relationships alongside more meaning-driven comprehension processes.

Revisiting the Memory-Based Processing Approach to Common Ground.

Horton and Gerrig (2005a) outlined a memory-based processing model of conversational common ground that provided a description of how speakers could both strategically and automatically gain access to information about others through domain-general memory processes acting over ordinary memory traces. In this article, we revisit this account, reviewing empirical findings that address aspects of this memory-based model. In doing so, we also take the opportunity to clarify what we believe this approach implies about the cognitive psychology of common ground, and just as important, what it does not imply. We also highlight related areas of research demonstrating how general cognitive processes can constrain access to relevant knowledge in ways that shape both language production and comprehension.