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.