Testing for Audience Design: a short report

Abstract

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.

When did you stop speaking to yourself? Age-related differences in adolescents’ world knowledge-based audience design

“…The referential production task was modified from two prior studies [ 3 , 5 ]. Its aim was to measure adolescents’ ability to adapt their referential expressions to the inferred world knowledge of their interlocutor.…”

“…Building on results from 7-year-olds [ 3 ], we assumed that participants would name target referents in the known trials and that a relatively small number of trials would suffice to record that behaviour. We, however, expected that pragmatic development (taking place between age 7 through the investigated age groups in the present study) would be observed as variability in the unknown trials, i.e.…”

“…When describing the general conversational conduct of children, Piaget stated that children under the age of 7 virtually speak to themselves [ 1 ]. This can be seen as an early observation that young children do not engage in what is frequently termed audience design (AD) [ 2 ] to the same extent as adults [ 3 – 5 ]. AD entails adjusting utterances to suit the needs of interlocutors.…”

“…Our previous investigations [ 3 , 5 ] suggest that 7-year-olds do not adhere to the maxim of quantity by tailoring utterances to the inferred world knowledge of addressees, to the same extent as adults. We are interested in the adolescent period as variation in this ability, since it might explain the substantial individual differences in the same ability that we observed in young adults [ 5 ].…”

“…Less is known regarding the development of AD in adolescence. However, we recently conducted an AD task with children, showing that 7-year-olds fail to adapt their utterances to addressee’s world knowledge in more than half of trials [ 3 ]. The children’s AD performance corresponded to the performance of the low pragmatic ability group in another of our lab’s studies, using a similar AD task, but with adults [ 5 ].…”