Student Presenter(s): Matthew Renz, Brandon Fanizza, Serena Sukhandan, Kyle Spiegel, Stuti Shah
Faculty Mentor: Nicole Calma-Roddin
Department: Behavioral Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island

There are a lot of different "communities" that people may be a part of. A community can describe a group of people who have the same interests and know certain subjects well. Common ground is the knowledge that people share, such as knowledge that comes from being members of the same community. Fussel and Krauss (1992) examined how a speaker will shift how they communicate based on the common ground they share with their addressee. Category typicality is the concept that some things in a category are more typical than others (e.g., apples vs. pomegranates for fruit). Onishi et al. (2008) found that category typicality can also affect sentence structure, with more typical items mentioned before atypical ones. The purpose of this study is to examine how people use language to communicate based on what they know and the typicality of what they are referring to. Pairs of NYIT students will complete a matching game, in which one participant is the director and the other is the matcher. The director will see a pair of images that they must communicate to the matcher. The matcher will select which images the director is referring to. We predict that: (1) although speakers will tend to refer to the left image first, when the image on the right is more well-known than the image on the left, the director will refer to the image on the right first. And (2) if the director is a part of a community related to the image, the director will simply name the image rather than describe it.