The notion of common ground is important for the production of referring expressions: In order for a referring expression to be felicitous, it has to be based on shared information. But determining what information is shared and what information is privileged may require gathering information from multiple sources, and constantly coordinating and updating them, which might be computationally too intensive to affect the earliest moments of production. Previous work has found that speakers produce overinformative referring expressions, which include privileged names, violating Grice’s Maxims, and concluded that this is because they do not mark the distinction between shared and privileged information. We demonstrate that speakers are in fact quite effective in marking this distinction in the form of their utterances. Nonetheless, under certain circumstances, speakers choose to overspecify privileged names.

When referring to named objects, speakers can choose either a name (mbira) or a description (that gourd-like instrument with metal strips); whether the name provides useful information depends on whether the speaker’s knowledge of the name is shared with the addressee. But, how do speakers determine what is shared? In 2 experiments a naïve participant (director) learned names for novel objects, then instructed another participant (matcher), who viewed 3 objects, to click on the target object. Directors learned novel names in 2 phases. First, the director and the matcher learned (shared) names either together or alone; second, the director learned (privileged) names alone. Directors typically used a name for items with shared names and a description for items with privileged names. When the director and matcher learned the names individually but with knowledge of what the other learned, directors were much more likely to use privileged names than when director and matcher learned shared names together. Experiment 1b separated effects of collaborative learning from partner-specific effects, showing collaborative learning experience with 1 person helps a speaker distinguish shared and privileged information with a new partner who has the same knowledge. Experiment 2 showed that partner-specific effects persisted even when semantic category was a reliable cue to which names were privileged. The results are interpreted as evidence that ordinary memory processes provide access to shared knowledge in real-time production of referring expressions and that shared experience when learning shared names provides a strong memory cue to the ground status of names.

This article proposes that a content-coverage approach to teaching can be a barrier to adopting more learner-centered active-learning approaches to teach biology. It includes strategies that instructors can implement to move to a learner-centered approach incorporating active learning.

Active learning classrooms (ALCs) provide opportunities for increased student engagement and interaction with classmates and the instructor. Reports indicate that students in these classrooms outperform their peers in traditional classrooms (Brooks 2011;Walker, Brooks, and Baepler 2011). In addition to these advantages, ALCs also present challenges for instructors who are used to teaching in more traditional classrooms and for students who are used to learning in these environments. In this chapter, we outline common teaching challenges in ALCs and provide strategies for overcoming them. These challenges and strategies come from the experiences of instructors we interact with in our work as teaching consultants and from our own experience teaching in ALCs. We begin with some background describing the differences between traditional classrooms and ALCs. Differences between ALCs and Traditional ClassroomsA traditional classroom is designed with student seats facing forward with easy sightlines to a central focal point at the front of the room. A board, a projection screen, and an instructor podium are all located within these sightlines. Students ideally have unimpeded visual access to the instructor, the board, and the projection screen, and they are able to take notes on a desktop surface during the presentation of classroom material. This type of arrangement favors instructional approaches that involve transmission of information from the instructor to the students. It is possible to have student-student and student-instructor interactions in these classrooms, but the physical constraints of the seating present challenges in doing so.

Listeners expect that a definite noun phrase with a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., the big …) will refer to an entity that is part of a set of objects contrasting on the scalar dimension, e.g., size (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers & Carlson, 1999). Two visual world experiments demonstrate that uttering a referring expression with a scalar adjective makes all members of the relevant contrast set more salient in the discourse model, facilitating subsequent reference to other members of that contrast set. Moreover, this discourse effect is caused primarily by linguistic mention of a scalar adjective and not by the listener’s prior visual or perceptual experience. These experiments demonstrate that language processing is sensitive to which information was introduced by linguistic mention, and that the visual world paradigm can be use to tease apart the separate contributions of visual and linguistic information to reference resolution.