During conversation, partners develop representations of jointly known information--the common ground--and use this knowledge to guide subsequent linguistic exchanges. Extensive research on 2-party conversation has offered key insights into this process, in particular, its partner-specificity: Common ground that is shared with 1 partner is not always assumed to be shared with other partners. Conversation often involves multiple pairs of individuals who differ in common ground. Yet, little is known about common ground processes in multi-party conversation. Here, we take a 1st step toward understanding this problem by examining situations in which simple dyadic representations of common ground might cause difficulty--situations in which dialogue partners develop shared labels (entrained terms), and then a 3rd (naïve) party joins the conversation. Experiment 1 examined unscripted, task-based conversation in which 2 partners entrained on terms. At test, speakers referenced game-pieces in a dialogue with their partner, or in a 3-party conversation including a new, naïve listener. Speakers were sensitive to the 3rd party, using longer, disfluent expressions when additionally addressing the new partner. By contrast, analysis of listener eye-fixations did not suggest sensitivity. Experiment 2 provided a stronger test of sensitivity and revealed that listeners do cancel expectations for terms that had been entrained before when a 3rd, naïve party joins the conversation. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying common ground, showing that rather than a unitary construct, common ground is flexibly adapted to the needs of a naïve 3rd party.

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we evaluated a new hypothesis-that the relevance of the addressee's perspective depends on the speaker's goals. In two experiments, Korean speakers described a target object in situations in which the perspective status of a competitor object (e.g., a large plate when describing a smaller plate) was manipulated. In Experiment 1, we examined whether speakers would use scalar-modified expressions even when the competitor was hidden from the addressee. The results demonstrated that information from both the speaker's and the addressee's perspectives influenced production. In Experiment 2, we examined whether utterance goals modulate this process. The results indicated that when a speaker makes a request, the addressee's perspective has a stronger influence than it does when the speaker informs the addressee. These results suggest that privileged knowledge does shape language use, but crucially, that the degree to which the addressee's perspective is considered is shaped by the relevance of the addressee's perspective to the utterance goals.

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When designing a definite referring expression, speakers take into account both the local context and certain aspects of the historical context, including whether similar referents have been mentioned in the past. When a similar item has been mentioned previously, speakers tend to elaborate their referring expression in order to differentiate the two items, a phenomenon called lexical differentiation. The present research examines the locus of the lexical differentiation effect and its relationship with memory for the discourse. In three experiments, we demonstrate that speakers differentiate to distinguish current from past referents; there was no evidence that speakers differentiate in order to avoid giving two items the same label. Post-task memory tests also revealed a high level of memory for the discourse history, a finding that is inconsistent with the view that failures of memory underlie low differentiation rates. Instead, memory for the discourse history, while necessary, is not sufficient for speakers to design language with respect to the historical context. Speakers must additionally view the discourse history as relevant to design language with respect to this broader context. Finally, measures of memory for past referents point to asymmetries between speakers and listeners in their memory for the discourse, with speakers typically remembering the discourse history better.