A direct assessment of the relation between shared knowledge and communication in a referential communication task

The present paper introduces a way to document quantitatively the changing relation between shared knowledge and communication over time. It is often assumed that people engaged in prolonged interaction come to share more knowledge over the course of interaction, and, further, it is assumed that this increase in shared knowledge enables them to communicate more efficiently with each other. In Experiments 1 and 2, this assumption was evaluated by monitoring the participants' knowledge of the experimental stimuli and their estimates about each other's knowledge periodically during several trials of a referential communication task. The results confirmed that participants developed more shared knowledge over the course of interaction, and that their estimates about shared knowledge become more accurate over successive trials. Experiment 3 was conducted in order to examine whether the use of intervening questionnaires in the earlier experiments prompted the participants to behave differently than they otherwise would. Although the use of the questionnaires encouraged a more active exchange of information, the overall pattern of behavior exhibited by the participants was not affected by this procedure.