Audience Tuning and Audience Design: A specific adaptation?

Thon F M, Jucks R

Abstract

Combining psycholinguistic and social psychological research the current study contributes to the debate on audience adaptation during language production. By varying the valence and source of information available to a speaker a critical test for audience specific adaptation was conducted. Results indicate that participants (N = 88) used any information available when describing a target, whether it stemmed from the interlocutor or not. Implications for theory and language use will be discussed.