When did you stop speaking to yourself? Adolescent development of world knowledge-based audience design

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) and adolescents (ages 15-16) 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. A post-test survey showed that relevant theory of mind information was accessed upon prompting in both age groups, but the younger age group did not consistently utilize this information during online production, resulting in a significantly improved world knowledge-based audience design across age groups. We also investigated the reliance of world knowledge-based audience design on cognitive control functions. Cognitive control (as reflected by performance on the Wisconsin card sorting task) increased significantly with age, but did not explain the age-related increase in audience design performance. We thus provide evidence for an adolescent development of world knowledge-based audience design over and above development of theory of mind and cognitive control.