Project A6 investigates how people of different ages and language backgrounds establish Common Ground. The project compares three groups: young first-language (L1) learners, adult second-language (L2) learners, and adult native speakers. Although both children and L2 learners are still developing proficiency in the target language, they differ fundamentally in cognitive maturity and prior world knowledge. The comparison between these learner groups allows the project to disentangle the roles of linguistic competencies, memory, and perspective-taking in building Common Ground.
Using memory experiments and eye-tracking methods, Project A6 focuses on how background knowledge about speakers, influences what people remember and how they anticipate upcoming speech in real time. Participants hear child or adult speakers refer to objects and statements that are either age-typical or not. The studies test how well listeners remember who said what, how their own role as speaker or listener affects memory, and how quickly they can predict references based on linguistic cues (such as grammatical gender) compared to non-linguistic cues (such as speaker age).
By tracing how these abilities change across development and language proficiency, Project A6 sheds light on the cognitive foundations of Common Ground for using and updating shared knowledge in linguistic communication.
