The influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production: Evidence from picture naming (original) (raw)

2007, Language and Cognitive Processes

In typical interactions, speakers frequently produce utterances that appear to reflect beliefs about the common ground shared with particular addressees. Horton and Gerrig (2005a) proposed that one important basis for audience design is the manner in which conversational partners serve as cues for the automatic retrieval of associated information from memory. This paper reports the results of two experiments demonstrating the influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production. Following an initial task designed to establish associations between specific words (Experiment 1) or object categories (Experiment 2) and each of two partners, participants named a series of pictures in the context of the same two individuals. Naming latencies were shortest for responses associated with the current partner, and were not significantly correlated with explicit recall of partner-item associations. Such partner-driven memory retrieval may constrain the information accessible to speakers as they produce utterances for particular addressees. During conversational interactions, the form and content of speakers' utterances are potentially shaped in a variety of ways by the intended audience. Speakers not only adjust global characteristics of their speech, such as overall complexity, in response to the perceived needs of particular types of addressees (e.g., non-native speakers; Bortfeld & Brennan, 1997), but can also make relatively fine-grained adjustments to referential (e.g., , syntactic (e.g., Haywood, Pickering, & Branigan, 2005) and even gestural (e.g., Özyürek, 2002) aspects of their behaviors based on interactions with specific individuals. Taken together, these partner-related adjustments are known as audience design and appear to be a ubiquitous feature of conversational speech. Although utterances routinely show evidence of having been tailored for certain addressees, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie audience design are not well understood. A primary issue concerns the extent to which instances of audience design necessarily emerge on the basis of considerations of the knowledge taken as shared between interlocutors-their common ground. Although individuals are presumed to coordinate interactions on the basis of beliefs about common ground , evidence is mixed regarding when and how this actually occurs (for a discussion, see . For example, speakers sometimes fail to consider addressees as much as they "should," producing utterances that are ambiguous or that show little evidence of addressee-specific adjustments . Conversely, some aspects of utterances that could be potentially helpful for addresses-e.g., articulatory reduction or heavy NP shift -may emerge instead on the basis of speaker-internal constraints.