Proffering a discourse in different communicative contexts

Communicative contexts may affect how the speaker proffers a discourse. In particular, we assumed that uni-directional (as compared with bi-directional) and audio (as compared with audio-visual) contexts induce the speaker to elaborate and then use an articulated mental model of the discourse because they do not allow the exploitation of all the communicative means. Unidirectional contexts do not allow recovery of communicative failures, and audio contexts do not allow access to extralinguistic communication. The results of an experiment involving 84 adult participants confirmed the predictions deriving from these assumptions: linguistic indices of the exploitation of an articulated mental model of the discourse are greater in uni-directional and audio contexts as compared with bi-directional and audio-visual contexts, respectively.