Many psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some stage by discourse-level information. Evidence over the past 20 years remains mixed as to the temporal dynamics of such top-down interactions. In…

It is well established in studies of two-party conversation that conversational partners jointly establish brief labels for repeatedly mentioned entities. When speaking to a new partner who is unfamiliar with the labels, speakers use longer expressions to facilitate understanding. How this process of audience design scales up to multiparty…

Many communicative situations present interlocutors with the opportunity to use multiple modalities to establish shared perspectives on conversational referents, a process known as grounding. In the current study, we use a card-matching task to examine how conversational grounding in younger and older adults is influenced both by direct visual…