Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Common ground, which can be mutually established between conversational partners through linguistic or visual modalities, influences subsequent language use and processing. We examined whether speakers keep track of the modality through which they share information with their conversational partners. In 32 triads, directors arranged tangram cards separately with two matchers, sharing some cards only linguistically (by describing cards the matcher couldn't see), some only visually (by silently showing them), some both linguistically and visually, and others not at all. Then directors arranged all cards in separate rounds with each matcher. The modality with which they had previously established common ground about a particular card with a particular matcher (e.g., linguistically with one partner and visually with the other) affected subsequent referring: References to cards previously shared only visually included more words and propositions than those shared only linguistically, which in turn included more words, reconceptualizations, and hedges than those shared both linguistically and visually. Such gradient, partner-specific adaptation during re-referring informs theoretical accounts of the interplay of memory and language use: it suggests that speakers can have rich representations of multimodal shared experiences that effectively cue relevant constraints about the perceptual conditions under which conversational partners establish common ground.