Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speakers involved in a communicative exchange construct aninternal model of their addressees and draw upon the model tocraft utterances that are likely to be understood. In many real-world situations (e.g., when talking to a non-expert, non-nativespeaker, or a child), this process of audience design involvesidentifying gaps in the lexical-semantic knowledge of thelistener and selecting alternative expressions. We examinespeaker adaptation to a listener with incomplete lexicalknowledge in the spatial domain, specifically a failure tocomprehend the basic terms left/right. Experimental andmodeling results provide evidence of rapid adaptation that ismodulated by the availability of alternative spatial terms. Weconsider how our approach relates to recent work incomputational pragmatics, and suggest that adaptation to thelexical knowledge of the addressee is an important butrelatively understudied topic for future research.