Compensating for an Inattentive Audience.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Psycholinguistics
• Social Psychology

Background:

• Common ground, or mutual knowledge, is foundational for effective language use in conversations.
• The classic view posits that inferring common ground relies on beliefs about a partner's physical, cognitive, and attentional states.
• The role of shared attention in forming common ground has not been empirically tested.

Purpose of the Study:

• To empirically test the attention assumption for common ground formation.
• To investigate whether evidence of a partner's attention is necessary for establishing shared understanding of entities.
• To determine if conversational partners assume common ground only when attention is mutually observed.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted using a referential communication task.
• Participants (speaker and two partners) learned novel monster names as a group.
• A key manipulation involved varying one partner's attentiveness during name learning, with the speaker describing monsters to each partner individually.

Main Results:

• Speakers' referring expressions indicated that common ground for novel names was assumed only when the partner demonstrated engaged attention during the learning phase.
• The inattentiveness of a partner during name acquisition led speakers to not assume shared knowledge of those names.
• Evidence suggests that observed attention is a prerequisite for establishing common ground for co-present entities.

Conclusions:

• The findings provide novel support for the classic proposal that common ground formation is critically dependent on assumptions about a conversational partner's attentional state.
• This study highlights the importance of mutual attention in establishing shared knowledge necessary for successful communication.
• The results underscore that simply being present is insufficient; active attention is required to build the foundation for shared understanding.