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

Abstract

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.

Strategi Unggul Konseling Pastoral pada Remaja dalam Hubungan Percintaan

“…14, No. 2, Desember 2023 menentukan batasan usia yang tepat untuk memasuki masa remaja menjadi kompleks, mengingat konsep dewasa dapat bervariasi bergantung pada perspektif dan nilai budaya dalam masyarakat (Arvidsson et al, 2022).…”

Conversations between ages five and seven – Connections to executive functions and implicature comprehension

“…The third ability: audience design (AD) is the conduct of adjusting the communicative signal with the conversation partner/ audience in mind. AD is also a productive pragmatic ability and was measured with a novel design (Arvidsson et al, 2022;Pagmar et al, 2021). Lastly, the fourth ability considered was narrative skill, the ability to follow conventional form, e.g.…”

“…Finally, a more thorough discussion on the limitations of the current audience design task can be found here in Pagmar, Arvidsson, and Uddén (2021). Most importantly, the audience design task was updated accordingly (Arvidsson et al, 2022), to allow for a more detailed interpretation, in addition to the binary measure used in the current study.…”