Preserved partner-specific audience design in multiparty conversation in people with Parkinson’s disease

Social communication is vital to everyday human interaction. One facet of social communication skills highlights the ability to adapt language to reflect the knowledge state of a given audience. This process is called audience design. To demonstrate this skill, a speaker must acknowledge their conversational partner’s level of familiarity with the topic of focus. If we are speaking to someone who is less familiar with a given topic, we use more extensive language to bridge the gap of understanding. The opposite is true for someone who we recognize as more familiar with the topic of interest.

People with Parkinson’s disease (PwPD) demonstrate motor and non-motor symptoms. While most of PD research and treatment targets motor symptoms, our focus is on the growing body of literature concerning cognition and language in PwPD. The preliminary study found that PwPD have intact audience design when speaking with one partner over the virtual modality. The current study aims to generalize these findings to face-to-face conversations. Furthermore, this is the first study to look at the language production of PwPD in multiparty conversation.

Expression length and referential expression (article) type were measured during a communication task in which PwPD described abstract images to a familiar partner, unfamiliar partner, or both (multiparty setting). No significant difference between PD and healthy controls was found, suggesting that PwPD demonstrate intact audience design at the multiparty conversational level. An exploratory analysis comparing the preliminary versus current study suggests that PwPD may be more sensitive to the downfalls of virtual communication. This is a topic that should be studied further. Overall, the study is an initial step in understanding the ability of PwPD to adapt language during social interactions with one or more people.