People make different kinds of gestures that may vary in their functions. For example, representational gestures can help communication. However, not all gestures promote mutual understanding, such as self-adaptors (touching one’s face; twirling a strand of hair), which are perceived as having anxious behaviours. Nicoladis et al. (2022) propose a positive relationship between adaptors and representational gestures. Our study examined forty-six future broadcasters’ production of self-adaptors and representational gestures in adult and child-directed programmes. We also investigated the relationship between adaptors and representational gestures as a function of broadcasting contexts. Results showed that broadcasters produced more representational but fewer self-adaptors in the child-directed programme. Participants’ self-adaptors negatively related to representational gestures when broadcasting in the adult-directed programme. Moreover, there is a stable individual trend in one’s self-adaptor strategy across programme contexts. In conclusion, speakers’ self-adaptor production can be shaped by individual differences and contextual requirements.

Child-directed language is a unique multimodal communication behaviour that differs from adult-directed language. We investigated how broadcasters organize their multimodal language production on an adult and child-directed programme to better understand the recipient design in the broadcasting context. Thirty-six future broadcasters produced live programmes for children and adults, respectively, whose linguistic features (utterance=3888), speech prosody, and gestures (N=8486) were analysed as a function of programme. We found that broadcasters used a higher mean pitch but a smaller pitch range, shorter utterances, high(er) frequency words, more questions, pointing and representational gestures but fewer pragmatic gestures in child-directed broadcasting. Gestures were also more salient and slower when addressing children audiences. However, there were no differences in lexical diversity, speaking rate, pausing, or beat gestures between programmes. In conclusion, broadcasters did engage in recipient design multimodally, but the distinction between the speaker and audience orientation is not binary but should be understood across signal channels according to contexts.

We studied individual differences in broadcasters' multimodal adult-directed and child-directed communication. Forty-six female future broadcasters simulated live broadcasts for both adults and children. Effects of speakers' individual styles, empathy and the Big Five personality traits on adult-directed and child-directed language (e.g., prosody, linguistic features and gestures) were examined. Results showed that all multimodal cues in adult-directed and child-directed language were highly correlated, but there were larger individual variations in the degree of adjustments between the two language registers. Moreover, empathy and certain personality traits could not only predict multimodal language production, but also the degree of adjustments for child-directed communication. For example, higher-empathetic participants speak faster, louder with a higher pitch, use diverse but more frequent words, and produce more salient referential gestures. In conclusion, despite an individual language style, empathy and the Big Five personality traits influence speakers' multimodal language production and the degree of audience design.