Partner-Specific Audience Design: Individual Differences in Working Memory
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Authors
Patzelt, Emily L.
Issue Date
2009
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
Speakers engage in audience design when they construct their utterances for particular
addressees and when they take into account common ground during utterance planning.
Common ground refers to mutual knowledge that is known to be mutual by both
interlocutors. Two approaches to audience design were tested: whether it is an emergent
feature of ordinary working memory (WM) processes or whether it is a specialized sub-process
of verbal WM. The present experiment was based on the game paradigm by
Swets, Jacovina, and Gerrig (2009, unpublished manuscript), wherein college students
took verbal and domain-general WM tests, then performed a referential communication
task. Directors first instructed 2 Matchers to rearrange items in a grid. The key rounds
were the second set in which the Directors described items entrained with both Matchers.
The investigators incorporated individual differences in WM along with eye tracking
measures in order to examine how high-span Directors engaged in partner-specific
audience design, and the. resource costs of the task. Preliminary results from temporal and
quantitative analyses of Directors' speech demonstrated a trend toward entrainment with
both addressees but occasional failures to exercise audience design in their continued
usage of already-entrained phrases with new referents to the current addressee.
Description
vii, 40 p.
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