Adapting syntax in writing to varying audiences as a function of age and social cognitive ability

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fourth-, eighth-, twelfth-graders and expert adults each wrote persuasive messages to three audiences arrayed along a dimension of intimacy to writer. Measures of social cognitive ability were also obtained. Scripts were analysed for (1) fluency, (2) subordination, (3) clause length, (4) logical adverbial clauses, and (5) conjunctions of conclusion. In addition to general developmental trends, results indicated effects of audience adaptation and of mediation of social cognitive ability. Findings support the view that evidence of later language development must be interpreted in light of communicative demands of tasks and subjects' rhetorical skills.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.