Speakers extrapolate community-level knowledge from individual linguistic encounters

Speakers' lexical choices are affected by interpersonal-level influences, like a tendency to reuse an interlocutor's words. Here, we examined how those additionally community-level factors, whether the interlocutor is from their own or another speech community (in-community vs. out-community partner), and such interpersonal experiences contribute acquisition of linguistic knowledge. Our three experiments tested (i) speakers' varied depending on partner's community, (ii) extrapolation these subsequent partner was influenced partners' communities. In Experiment 1, Spanish participants played two sessions online picture-matching-and-naming task, encountering same pictures but different confederates in each session. The first confederate either in-community (Spanish) (Latin American); second as not. Participants' referential Session 1 were choices, not community. However, participants' likelihood subsequently maintain 2 replicated this pattern Mexicans, 3 confirmed that results driven confederates' communities, rather than perceived status. suggest speakers encode information during dialogue store it inform future contexts language use, even when has particular encounter. Thus, learn knowledge extrapolating experiences.