Who Knows What about Whom: What Role Does Common Ground Play in Accessing Distant Information?

Abstract

Do readers keep track of protagonists’ common ground? If so, what role does this awareness play in reactivating distant information? Using passages in which protagonists part and later reunite, in Experiment 1 we replicated the finding (Greene, Gerrig, McKoon, & Ratcliff, 1994) that their reunion reactivates text elements that were part of their common ground. In Experiment 2, we tested two accounts of this effect: (a) readers reactivate the contents of protagonists’ common ground by way of preparing for their interaction; and (b) low-level memory processes reactivate text elements associated with the protagonist returning to the reader's focus. We found that the pattern of reactivation was almost identical whether the text element was part of common ground or not, supporting the memory-based account. In Experiment 3 we obtained evidence that despite the lack of role for common ground in reactivating distant information, readers are indeed aware of who knows what about whom in short texts. The results are discussed in terms of memory-based theories of text processing.