This paper reports an experiment examining the extent to which younger and older speakers engage in audience design, the process of adapting one’s speech for particular addressees.  Through an initial card-matching task, pairs of younger and pairs of older adults established common ground for sets of picture cards.  Subsequently, the same individuals worked separately on a computer-based picture description task that involved a novel partner-cueing paradigm.  Younger speakers’ descriptions to the familiar partner were shorter, initiated more quickly, and exhibited a higher proportion of lexical overlap with previous descriptions than descriptions to an unfamiliar partner.  Older speakers showed no equivalent evidence for audience design, which may reflect difficulties with retrieving partner-specific information from memory during conversation.