Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.