Audience Design Research Articles

Modelling stylistic variation in threatened and under-documented languages

AbstractThe centrality of style is uncontested in sociolinguistics: it is an essential construct in the study of linguistic variation and change in the speech community. This is not the case in the language-obsolescence literature, where stylistic variation among endangered-language speakers is described as an ephemeral, or “marginal” resource, and where speakers exhibiting “stylistic shrinkage” become “monostylistic”. This argument is invoked in variationist theory too, where “monostylism” is presented as support for the tenets of Audience Design (Bell 1984). This article reports on a study that adopts variationist methods in a context of severe language endangerment. Evidence from two linguistic variables in Francoprovençal demonstrates the presence of socially meaningful stylistic variation among the last generation of fluent speakers, offering counter-evidence to classic claims. This evidence is used to argue that accounts of stylistic variation in language obsolescence are not sufficiently nuanced and should be reconsidered in light of recent research.

Intra-familial language choice in two multi-generational Polish-Swedish-speaking families

ABSTRACT Informed by Spolsky’s language policy model and the notion of audience design, this study addresses the under-researched context of the multi-generational family originating in the old Polish migration to Sweden. Two families were studied with a focus on (i) intra-familial language choice, and (ii) language policies derived from this choice and from individual reflections. Data were collected through an open-ended bilingual form and interviews, and then underwent descriptive, thematic and appraisal analysis. The findings suggest that family language policy is a heterogeneous social phenomenon. At the ideological level, Polish is the language of the family at home. At the level of practice, family members modify the policy in multiple ways. Language management is primarily verbalised as consequent usage of Polish within the family. Also, an agency belief is expressed, meaning that subsequent generations make independent linguistic choices. With respect to the influence of audience design, the families adjust to the language of the participating audience. With a non-participating audience, Swedish is a preferred or accepted choice. This paper concludes that there should be a follow-up study on the families presented here, which would further contribute to the still limited understanding of how family language policies are reshaped by later generations.

The scope of audience design in child-directed speech: Parents’ tailoring of word lengths for adult versus child listeners.

When communicating with other people, adults reduce or lengthen words based on their predictability, frequency, and discourse status. But younger listeners have less experience than older listeners in processing speech variation across time. In 2 experiments, we tested whether English-speaking parents reduce word durations differently across utterances in child-directed speech (CDS) versus adult-directed speech (ADS). In a child-friendly game with an array of objects and destinations, adult participants (N = 48) read instructions to an experimenter (adult-directed) and then to their own 2- to 3-year-old children (child-directed). In Experiment 1, speakers produced sentences containing high-frequency target nouns, and in Experiment 2, they produced sentences containing low-frequency target nouns. In both CDS and ADS in both experiments, speakers reduced repeated mentions of target nouns across successive utterances. However, speakers reduced less in CDS than in ADS, and low-frequency nouns in CDS were overall longer than low-frequency nouns in ADS. Together, the results suggest that repetition reduction may be beyond speaker control, but that speakers still engage in audience design when producing words for relatively inexperienced listeners. We conclude that language production involves nested audience-driven and speaker-driven processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

What Influences Successful Communication? An Examination of Cognitive Load and Individual Differences

ABSTRACT The underlying cognitive mechanisms explaining why speakers sometimes make communication errors are not well understood. Some scholars have theorized that audience design engages automatic processes when a listener is present; others argue that it relies on effortful resources, even if a listener is present. We hypothesized that working memory is engaged during communicative audience design and that the extent to which working memory is engaged relies on individual differences in cognitive abilities and concurrent amount of resources available. In Experiment 1, participants completed a referential task under high, low, or no cognitive load with a present listener whose perspective differed from the speaker’s. Speakers made few referential errors under no and low load, but errors increased when cognitive load was highest. In Experiment 2, the listener was absent. Speakers made few referential errors under no and low load, but errors increased when cognitive load was highest, suggesting that audience design is still effortful under high cognitive load, both when the listener was present and when the listener was absent. Experiment 3 tested whether cognitive abilities predicted communication performance. Participants with higher fluid intelligence and working memory capacity made fewer communication errors. Our findings suggest that communication relies on available cognitive resources, and therefore errors occur as a function of factors like cognitive load and individual differences.

Effects of Priming and Audience Design on the Explicitness of Referring Expressions: Evidence From a Confederate Priming Paradigm

ABSTRACT In formulating a referring expression, speakers may choose between an explicit expression (such as a proper name or a noun phrase) or a reduced form such as a pronoun. We investigated whether speakers are influenced by their conversation partners to produce full noun phrases instead of pronouns and whether this differs depending on whether their partner was a native or a nonnative English speaker. Participants took turns describing and matching cartoons with a (confederate) partner, who used either full noun phrases or pronouns when referring to discourse entities. We found that participants were more explicit or less explicit in their own referring expressions depending on their partner’s behavior on the turn before and adapted to the same extent with native and nonnative partners. We conclude that speakers adapt their production of referring expressions based on what their partners say but do not make strategic adjustments based on who their partner is.

Retrieval processes and audience design

Conversational partners develop shared knowledge. In referential communication tasks, partners collaboratively establish brief labels for hard-to-name images. These image-label mappings are associated in memory with that partner, evidenced by use of those brief labels with the same partner, and longer descriptions with new partners. According to the people-as-contexts view, the conversational partner functions as a contextual cue to support retrieval of conversationally-relevant information. Inspired by findings from the memory literature that context effects can be stronger when retrieval is more explicit, two experiments test the hypothesis that the speaker will be more likely to invoke the partner as a retrieval cue when retrieval processes are more explicit. The results indicated a strong effect of partner that, contrary to these predictions, was not boosted by explicit retrieval processes. The lack of an effect of retrieval processes speaks to the ubiquity with which language use in conversation is tailored to the particular people with whom we converse.

Partner-Specific Communication Deficits in Individuals With Alzheimer's Disease.

Purpose Speakers adjust referential expressions to the listeners' knowledge while communicating, a phenomenon called "audience design." While individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show difficulties in discourse production, it is unclear whether they exhibit preserved partner-specific audience design. The current study examined if individuals with AD demonstrate partner-specific audience design skills. Method Ten adults with mild-to-moderate AD and 12 healthy older adults performed a referential communication task with two experimenters (E1 and E2). At first, E1 and participants completed an image-sorting task, allowing them to establish shared labels. Then, during testing, both experimenters were present in the room, and participants described images to either E1 or E2 (randomly alternating). Analyses focused on the number of words participants used to describe each image and whether they reused shared labels. Results During testing, participants in both groups produced shorter descriptions when describing familiar images versus new images, demonstrating their ability to learn novel knowledge. When they described familiar images, healthy older adults modified their expressions depending on the current partner's knowledge, producing shorter expressions and more established labels for the knowledgeable partner (E1) versus the naïve partner (E2), but individuals with AD were less likely to do so. Conclusions The current study revealed that both individuals with AD and the control participants were able to acquire novel knowledge, but individuals with AD tended not to flexibly adjust expressions depending on the partner's knowledge state. Conversational inefficiency and difficulties observed in AD may, in part, stem from disrupted audience design skills.

Bilingual referential choice in cognitively demanding situations

AbstractUnder the Interface Hypothesis, bilinguals’ non-nativelike referential choices may be influenced by the increased cognitive demands and less automatic processing of bilingual production. We test this hypothesis by comparing pronoun production in the L2 of nonbalanced Spanish–English bilinguals to that of English monolinguals in two cognitively challenging contexts. In Experiment 1, both monolinguals and bilinguals produced more explicit references when part of the information was unavailable to their addressee (privileged ground) than when all information was shared (common ground), evidencing audience design. In Experiment 2, verbal load led to more unspecified references than visual load and no load (an effect statistically indistinguishable between groups but numerically driven by the monolingual group). While bilinguals produced overall more pronouns than monolinguals in both experiments, there was no indication that bilinguals’ referential choice was disproportionally affected by increased cognitive demand, contrary to the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis.

Overlapping Mechanisms in Implying and Inferring.

Prior psychological work on Gricean implicature has revealed much about how listeners infer (comprehension) but little about how speakers imply (production). This is surprising given the inherent link between the two. This study aimed to obtain a more integral understanding of implicatures by investigating the processes that are shared between inference and implication. In two experiments, a participant and a confederate engaged in a dialogue game that invited the use of implicatures. In each there was a global priming manipulation, in which a confederate predominantly used implicit or explicit utterances, and a local priming manipulation, in which the utterance structure varied from trial to trial. Participants could choose whether to imply or use an explicit expression. Our results revealed that speaker and listener align on their use of implicatures. We interpret the local priming results as providing evidence of shared implicature representations between speaker and listener, and the global priming results as a form of audience design. We also present a model of implicature production that explains our findings.

Does prescriptivism work? Non-standard lexis in Lithuanian radio and TV in 1960–2010

Does prescriptivism work? Non-standard lexis in Lithuanian radio and TV in 1960–2010

Contextual Integration in Multiparty Audience Design.

Communicating with multiple addressees poses a problem for speakers: Each addressee necessarily comes to the conversation with a different perspective-different knowledge, different beliefs, and a distinct physical context. Despite the ubiquity of multiparty conversation in everyday life, little is known about the processes by which speakers design language in multiparty conversation. While prior evidence demonstrates that speakers design utterances to accommodate addressee knowledge in multiparty conversation, it is unknown if and how speakers encode and combine different types of perspective information. Here we test whether speakers encode the perspective of multiple addressees, and then simultaneously consider their knowledge and physical context during referential design in a three-party conversation. Analyses of referential form-expression length, disfluency, and elaboration rate-in an interactive multiparty conversation demonstrate that speakers do take into consideration both addressee knowledge and physical context when designing utterances, consistent with a knowledge-scene integration view. These findings point to an audience design process that takes as input multiple types of representations about the perspectives of multiple addressees, and that bases the informational content of the to-be-designed utterance on a combination of the perspectives of the intended addressees.

Script variation as audience design: Imagining readership and community in Japanese yuri comics

AbstractBuilding on recent work supporting a sociolinguistic approach to orthographic choice, this study engages with paratextual language use in yuri, a subgenre of Japanese shōjo manga ‘girls’ comics’ that centers on same-sex romantic and/or erotic relationships between female characters. The comic magazine Comic Yuri Hime has been the dominant, if not only, yuri-oriented published magazine in Japan since its inception in 2005. Though both written and consumed by a primarily female audience, the magazine has undergone numerous attempts to rebrand and refocus the target audience as a means to broaden the magazine's readership. This change in target demographic is reflected in the stylistic representation of paratextual occurrences of the second-person pronoun anata, indicating the role of the textual landscape in reflecting, and reifying, an imagined target audience. (Script variation, manga, popular media, Japan, yuri manga)

Audience Design in Multiparty Conversation.

How do speakers design what they say in order to communicate effectively with groups of addressees who vary in their background knowledge of the topic at hand? Prior findings indicate that when a speaker addresses a pair of listeners with discrepant knowledge, that speakers Aim Low, designing their utterances for the least knowledgeable of the two addressees. Here, we test the hypothesis that speakers will depart from an Aim Low approach in order to efficiently communicate with larger groups of interacting partners. Further, we ask whether the cognitive demands of tracking multiple conversational partners' perspectives places limitations on successful audience design. We find that speakers can successfully track information about what up to four of their partners do and do not know in conversation. When addressing groups of 3-4 addressees at once, speakers design language based on the combined knowledge of the group. These findings point to an audience design process that simultaneously represents the perspectives of multiple other individuals and combines these representations in order to design utterances that strike a balance between the different needs of the individuals within the group.

How speakers adapt object descriptions to listeners under load

ABSTRACTA controversial issue in psycholinguistics is the degree to which speakers employ audience design during language production. Hypothesising that a consideration of the listener’s needs is particularly relevant when the listener is under cognitive load, we had speakers describe objects for a listener performing an easy or a difficult simulated driving task. We predicted that speakers would introduce more redundancy in their descriptions in the difficult driving task, thereby accommodating the listener’s reduced cognitive capacity. The results showed that speakers did not adapt their descriptions to a change in the listener’s cognitive load. However, speakers who had experienced the driving task themselves before and who were presented with the difficult driving task first were more redundant than other speakers. These findings may suggest that speakers only consider the listener’s needs in the presence of strong enough cues, and do not update their beliefs about these needs during the task.

Evidence of preserved audience design with aging in interactive conversation.

Speakers tailor referential expressions to the listener's knowledge, a phenomenon called audience design. Audience design requires access to partner-specific representations in memory, which could be compromised among older adults who experience memory declines. In fact, little is known about how the memory representation of shared knowledge with a conversational partner influences audience design in multiparty conversation. We examined how young and older adults tailor their utterances for partners holding different representations of the same item. Both younger and older adults successfully adjusted their referential expressions to the current partner's knowledge state in a live conversation. However, when memory was explicitly probed, older adults showed a source memory deficit in distinguishing which partner held which label. These results suggest that explicit memory may not be necessary for audience design, and that implicit memory processes, which are preserved with aging, may contribute to effective audience design. The findings highlight a pathway to preserved communicative competence with aging and the roles of multiple memory systems including both implicit and explicit systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Revisiting Cultural Aspects of Translation: The Case of “Running in the Family” and “Funny Boy” in French

[full article and abstract in English]
 In this study, we propose to examine some of the challenges and opportunities afforded to the translators by the culturally rich “Running in the Family” (1982) by Michael Ondaatje and “Funny Boy” (1994) by Shyam Selvadurai, through a comparison of the initial texts – which are laden with Sri Lankan cultural content – and their French translations: “Un air de famille” (1991) by Marie-Odile Fortier-Masek and, respectively, “Drôle de garcon” (2000) by Frédéric Limare and Susan Fox-Limare (2000). After a brief discussion of audience design and communication in translation, we focus on the interplay of implicitation and explicitation, drawing on examples from the texts, in particular from the culinary domain. We consider the translators’ options in light of the imperative to design for a new readership and suggest that relevance – which is a matter of degree – is pursued through a mix of choices of unequal suitability.

Supplemental Material for Evidence of Preserved Audience Design With Aging in Interactive Conversation

Supplemental Material for Evidence of Preserved Audience Design With Aging in Interactive Conversation

Style-shifting and accommodative competence in Late Middle English written correspondence: Putting Audience Design to the test of time

AbstractStyle constitutes an essential component for the non-referential indexicality of speakers’ sociolinguistic behaviour in interpersonal communication. Historical Sociolinguistics applies tenets and findings of present-day research to the interpretation of linguistic material from the past, but without giving intra-speaker variation the same relevance as to inter-speaker variation. The aim of this paper is to show results obtained from the investigation of style-shifting processes in late medieval England by applying contemporary models of Audience Design to diaphasic variation from historical corpora of written correspondence. The study is carried out through the analysis of the use of the orthographic variable (TH) by male members of the Paston family from thePaston Letterscorpus when addressing recipients from different social ranks. The data show both addressee and referee-based accommodation patterns in the communicative practice of medieval individuals. In addition to tracing language variation and change in speech communities, private letters may also shed light onto the motivations and mechanisms for intra-speaker variation in individuals and their stylistic choices in past societies.

Improving collaborative learning: Guiding knowledge exchange through the provision of information about learning partners and learning contents

Various studies have revealed the positive influence of group awareness support on collaborative learning. They attributed this effect to the availability of information about learning partners but did not yet consider learners' prior knowledge activation, possibly caused by additionally provided information about the content of learning material. Moreover, advanced technologies such as text-mining methods enable the automated identification of material-related content of learners' prior knowledge. Providing co-learners with such information might further improve their topic selection and knowledge integration during knowledge exchange due to enhanced activation. Thus, to investigate the individual effects of both types of information and the effects of combining both, the present experimental study (N = 120) systematically varies information about learning partners (available/unavailable) and information about learning contents (specified/unspecified) in a 2 × 2 between-design. We found tendencies that learners with available partner-related information address more task-specific concepts in explanations, but detected neither effects of specified information about learning contents nor interaction effects. Further 2 × 2 mixed-designs that included co-learners’ prior knowledge levels as within-variables demonstrated that providing specified information about learning contents significantly improves questioning strategies and partner-related information significantly improves audience design in explanations. Finally, a mediation analysis suggested a significant indirect effect claiming that the knowledge integration level and partner modeling accuracy mediate the effect of available partner-related information on knowledge recall if this information is not content-specific. Hence, specified information about learning contents apparently guides metacognitive regulation with regard to identifying and filling own knowledge gaps. By contrast, plain partner-related information apparently evokes deeper cognitive elaboration.

A Mechanistic Framework for Explaining Audience Design in Language Production.

Audience design refers to the situation in which speakers fashion their utterances so as to cater to the needs of their addressees. In this article, a range of audience design effects are reviewed, organized by a novel cognitive framework for understanding audience design effects. Within this framework, feedforward (or one-shot) production is responsible for feedforward audience design effects, or effects based on already known properties of the addressee (e.g., child versus adult status) or the message (e.g., that it includes meanings that might be confusable). Then, a forward modeling approach is described, whereby speakers independently generate communicatively relevant features to predict potential communicative effects. This can explain recurrent processing audience design effects, or effects based on features of the produced utterance itself or on idiosyncratic features of the addressee or communicative situation. Predictions from the framework are delineated.