Abstract
For successful language use, interlocutors must be able to accurately assess their shared knowledge (“common ground”). Such knowledge can be accumulated through linguistic and non-linguistic context, but the same context can be associated with different patterns of knowledge, depending on the interlocutor's participant role (Wilkes-Gibbs and Clark, 1992). Although there is substantial evidence that children's ability to model partners' knowledge develops gradually, most such evidence focuses on non-linguistic context. We investigated the extent to which 8- to 10-year-old children can assess common ground developed through prior linguistic context, and whether this is sensitive to variations in participant role. Children repeatedly described tangram figures to another child, and then described the same figures to a third child who had been a side-participant, an overhearer, or absent during the initial conversation. Children showed evidence of partner modeling, producing shorter referential expressions with repeated mention to the same partner. Moreover, they demonstrated sensitivity to differences in common ground with the third child based on participant role on some but not all measures (e.g., description length, but not definiteness). Our results suggest that by ten, children make distinctions about common ground accumulated through prior linguistic context but do not yet consistently deploy this knowledge in an adult-like way.
Highlights
Learning to use language successfully requires more than acquiring words to express particular concepts and the grammar to combine those words to form particular propositions; it involves learning when to use which words and which grammatical forms to particular listeners so that the speaker’s meaning is appropriately communicated to the addressee
We consider whether 8 to 10-year-old children are able to draw appropriate inferences about their partners’ knowledge on the basis of their partners’ participation in previous dialogue, and examine how such inferences might be reflected in the language they produce
Graham et al (2014) replicated these effects when the referential pact violation related to use of an adjective (e.g., “fluffy dog” vs. “spotted dog,” for a dog that was both fluffy and spotted), rather than different conceptualizations of the object at a categorical level. These results suggest that in comprehension, even pre-school children are sensitive to linguistic common ground, and the referential pacts that they and a particular partner have established in previous discourse
Summary
Learning to use language successfully requires more than acquiring words to express particular concepts and the grammar to combine those words to form particular propositions; it involves learning when to use which words and which grammatical forms to particular listeners so that the speaker’s meaning is appropriately communicated to the addressee. Speakers can refer to things in many different ways; for example, the same entity can be described as a dog or the fluffy Labrador from down the road. This is the case for entities with low codability such as tangrams, which can usually be conceptualized in very different ways (e.g., as a skater vs a chicken) depending on a speaker’s perspective (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986). Speakers draw on their common ground, the knowledge that they believe themselves to share with their listeners
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