Conversational Common Ground and Memory Processes in Language Production

Speakers in conversation routinely engage in audience design. That is, they construct their utterances to be understood by particular addressees. Standard accounts of audi-ence design have frequently appealed to the notion of common ground. On this view, speakers produce well-designed utterances by expressly considering the knowledge they take as shared with addressees. This article suggests that conversational com-mon ground, rather than being a category of specialized mental representations, is more usefully conceptualized as an emergent property of ordinary memory pro-cesses. This article examines 2 separate but equally important processes: commonal-ity assessment and message formation. Commonality assessment involves the re-trieval of memory traces concerning what information is shared with an addressee, whereas message formation involves deciding how to use that information in conver-sation. Evidence from the CallHome English corpus of telephone conversations shows how each of these processes is rooted in basic aspects of human memory. The overall goal of this article is to demonstrate the need for a more cognitive psychologi-cal account of conversational common ground. Consider this excerpt from a conversation between two friends who have not spo-ken with each other for some time: (1) A: Oh first of all I have Shana’s shower coming up that I have to do. B: Ah, that’s right. A: That’s going to be like a huge like three day effort with all the cooking and cleaning and like actually party [sic] that I have to do. B: Is there anyone you can get to help you? A: Um Jessica’s going to help and Beth might because you see, Diane is here now.