Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In language, speakers are more likely to mention the goals, orendpoints, of motion events than they are to mention sources,or starting points (e.g. Lakusta & Landau, 2005). Thisphenomenon has been explained in cognitive terms, but mayalso be affected by discourse-communicative factors: Forparticipants in prior work, sources can be characterized asgiven, already-known information, while goals are new,relevant information to communicate. We investigate to whatextent the goal bias in language (and memory) is affected whenthe source is or is not in common ground between speaker andhearer, and thus whether it is discourse-given or -new. We findthat the goal bias in language is severely diminished whensource and goal are discourse-new. We suggest that the goalbias in language can be attributed to discourse-communicativefactors in addition to any cognitive goal bias. Discourse factorscannot fully account for the bias in memory.