Audience design and frame of reference in adolescents' reference production
2021 (English)In: Abstracts: 17th International Pragmatics Conference, Winterthur, 27 June – 2 July, 2021, 2021, p. 1519-1519Conference paper, Poster (with or without abstract) (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
When participating in dialogue, speakers design their utterances to accommodate the individual needs of listeners (Bentz, et al., in prep). This feature is known as audience design (Clark & Murphy, 1982). Although audience design is central to conventional conversation, it is not known at which age speakers begin taking into account the world knowledge/frame of reference of their interlocutors. Indications from recent studies suggest that albeit preschool and first grade children engage in basic forms of perspective taking (Nadig & Sedivy, 2002), they fail to adapt their utterances in accordance with listener-specific needs in reference production (Pagmar, et al., in prep). Adult participants do however adapt their utterances, and individual differences in the adult population were not dependent on cognitive control function (Bentz, et al., in prep). The dependence on cognitive control function, e.g. switching, may be hypothesized to be greater in children. The current study aims to test the referential production of two age groups; early and mid adolescents (11;0-12;11 and 15;0-16;11), with the purpose of tracing the development of the ability to use information regarding listener-perspective during on-line referential production, and test its relation to cognitive control. The paradigm builds further on the well-established Director’s task but does not require the participants to take the visual perspective of the listener. Instead, participants are presented with a set of pictures portraying referents well-known to them, e.g. popular cartoon characters, hosts of children’s tv-shows, etc. Knowledge of the referents are controlled through post-test surveys. Furthermore, they are asked to direct listeners of two distinct groups, small children and elders, into choosing the target referent. Participants who take the frame of reference of addressees into consideration are expected to adopt different strategies when addressing the different groups, i.e., increase informativeness when denoting referents assumed to be unknown to the listener vs using less informative referential expressions (such as proper names) when denoting referents judged to be known to the listener. Cognitive control/executive function is assessed using the Wisconsin card sorting task. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive costs of switching strategies and the Gricean maxim of quantity.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021. p. 1519-1519
Keywords [en]
audience design, pragmatic development, reference production, adolescence, theory of mind, cognitive control functions.
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics
Research subject
Linguistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-197027OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-197027DiVA, id: diva2:1596536
Conference
17th International Pragmatics Conference, Winterthur, Switzerland, June 27 – July 2, 2021
2021-09-222021-09-222022-02-25Bibliographically approved