People as contexts in conversation

Abstract

Language use in conversational settings is tailored to the knowledge and beliefs of specific conversational partners. We compare conversational partners in studies of language use to environmental context in studies of memory retrieval, and discuss the evidence of partner-specific language use with respect to the memory mechanisms involved. We outline a proposal regarding the process of encoding partner-specific contextual bindings in conversation in which we argue that formation of these bindings is limited by attention and memory processes. We discuss the way in which this proposal accounts for the existing data in the literature, and outline a series of predictions that this view makes.