Audience Adaptation in Children's Persuasive Letters

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Abstract
Nine-year-old children wrote persuasive letters to two individuals. In the first part of the study, the letters were analyzed to determine the extent to which subjects adapted them by including context-creating statements, descriptive information, and persuasive appeals. In general, these letters were well adapted to the audiences' needs and characteristics. In the second part of the study, subjects participated in an oral task which provided an index of their competence in listener-adapted communication. This competence was significantly correlated with subjects' use of appeals tailored to characteristics of the two audiences.