Disambiguation by community membership

Abstract

To interpret utterances in conversations, listeners must often make reference to the common ground they share with speakers. For example, when faced with an utterance such as "That game was a disaster," listeners must decide whether they share common assumptions about what outcome would be disastrous. In our experiments, we examine how common ground, as encoded in community membership, is used to constrain judgments about the interpretations of ambiguous utterances. In Experiment 1, subjects were sensitive to community membership when they were asked to evaluate the interpretations at a leisurely pace. Experiment 2 replicated this result with greater time pressure. Experiment 3 demonstrated that judgments based on assessments of community membership were equivalent to those based on certain knowledge, except when the judgements were challenged. The results suggest that models of memory retrieval during language comprehension should make mention of access to common ground.