Expressions référentielles et formes prosodiques : quand et comment la prise en compte de notre interlocuteur guide‑t‑elle nos choix linguistiques ?

The process of accommodating or adapting to the needs and knowledge of our interlocutor in a conversation is called audience design (Clark & Murphy, 1982; Clark, 1996; Galati & Brennan, 2010). We also speak of perspective taking since interlocutors have to take into account the perspective of their interlocutor when they formulate their statements (Brown-Schmidt & Heller, 2018). To understand when and how the interlocutors use audience design means to understand how speakers take into account information that they believe they share with their interlocutor, in other words their common ground. Audience design implies the distinction between what is part of the common ground (ie, the information shared with a particular interlocutor and mutually recognized as such; Clark, 1996), and what is part of the private knowledge (ie, privileged ground) specific to each speaker and unknown to the interlocutor. The common ground includes contextual knowledge (on the current physical context or related to previous conversational exchanges) and encyclopedic knowledge (such as knowledge shared by a specific community, e.g., the residents of Aix-en-Provence) shared by the speaker and the listener and recognized by the two interlocutors to be known by each of them (Clark & Marshall, 1981). Thus, the information shared or not shared by the interlocutors at one point in the conversation would determine the type of expressions or utterances used by the speaker for his/her interlocutor.While it is clear that speakers and listeners adapt their linguistic behavior to their interlocutor in order to avoid and resolve situations of incomprehension, to what extent, and in which situation, audience design is involved is still a question under debate. In other words, when, and how, do we take into account the perspective of our interlocutor when we choose particular linguistic forms (e.g., referential expressions, prosodic forms)? The aim of this article is to frame the studies we conducted at the LPL as part of this debate.Several audience design models have been proposed in psycholinguistics (e.g., collaborative model, egocentric model, interactive alignment model, dual processing model, probabilistic model, memory-based model) to account for the idea that speakers would not do inferences about the knowledge of their interlocutor continuously. These models diverge on the hypothesis of a more or less systematic use of the common ground in the implementation of audience design. While t