Vocabulary

Audience design

Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.

Common ground

Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.

Ingroup

Group to which a person belongs.

Lexicon

Words and expressions.

Linguistic intergroup bias

A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.

Outgroup

Group to which a person does not belong.

Priming

A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.

Situation model

A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.

Social brain hypothesis

The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.

Social networks

Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.

Syntax

Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.