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Title: Retrieval processes and audience design
Conversational partners develop shared knowledge. In referential communication tasks, partners collaboratively establish brief labels for hard-to-name images. These image-label mappings are associated in memory with that partner, evidenced by use of those brief labels with the same partner, and longer descriptions with new partners. According to the people-as-contexts view, the conversational partner functions as a contextual cue to support retrieval of conversationally-relevant information. Inspired by findings from the memory literature that context effects can be stronger when retrieval is more explicit, two experiments test the hypothesis that the speaker will be more likely to invoke the partner as a retrieval cue when retrieval processes are more explicit. The results indicated a strong effect of partner that, contrary to these predictions, was not boosted by explicit retrieval processes. The lack of an effect of retrieval processes speaks to the ubiquity with which language use in conversation is tailored to the particular people with whom we converse.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1921492
NSF-PAR ID:
10274085
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of memory and language
Volume:
115
ISSN:
0749-596X
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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