In this short report, we present the results from a novel test set-up, aiming to track the practice of Audience Design (AD) in the reference production of Swedish speaking 7 year olds. AD is the conduct of altering one's communicative signal with the receiver of the signal in mind, so that they can easily infer its intended meaning. The results show a distinctive group that does not adapt production in the same manner as in a practice trial prompt for a third party without shared frame of mind. While we controlled for the participant’s knowledge of the referential objects of the test, we did not control for the participants assumptions about the world knowledge of the different addresses, which might have altered the result.

The ability to adapt utterances to the world knowledge of one’s addressee is undeniably ubiquitous in human social cognition, but its development and association with other cognitive mechanisms during adolescence have not been studied. In an online production task, we measured the ability of children entering adolescence (ages 11-12) and adolescents (ages 15-16) to tailor referential expressions in accordance with the inferred world knowledge of their addressee – an ability we refer to as world knowledge-based audience design. A post-test survey showed that relevant theory of mind information was accessed upon prompting in both age groups, but the younger age group did not consistently utilize this information during online production, resulting in a significantly improved world knowledge-based audience design across age groups. We also investigated the reliance of world knowledge-based audience design on cognitive control functions. Cognitive control (as reflected by performance on the Wisconsin card sorting task) increased significantly with age, but did not explain the age-related increase in audience design performance. We thus provide evidence for an adolescent development of world knowledge-based audience design over and above development of theory of mind and cognitive control.

The ability to adapt utterances to the world knowledge of one’s addressee is undeniably ubiquitous in human social cognition, but its development and association with other cognitive mechanisms during adolescence have not been studied. In an online production task, we measured the ability of children entering adolescence (ages 11–12, M = 11.8, N = 29 ,   17   girls ) and adolescents (ages 15–16, M = 15.9, N = 29 ,   17   girls ) to tailor referential expressions in accordance with the inferred world knowledge of their addressee—an ability we refer to as world knowledge-based audience design (AD). A post-test survey showed that both age groups held similar assumptions about the addressees’ knowledge of referents, but the younger age group did not consistently adapt their utterances in accordance with these assumptions during online production, resulting in a significantly improved AD behaviour across age groups. We also investigated the reliance of AD on executive functions (EF). Executive functioning (as reflected by performance on the Wisconsin card sorting task) increased significantly with age, but did not explain the age-related increase in AD performance. We thus provide evidence in support of an adolescent development of world knowledge-based AD over and above development of EF.