Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children learn to talk to others? Mastery of language means being able to communicate with a wide array of interlocutors (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Yet researchers have tended to treat parent-child interaction as the paradigmatic site of language learning, neglecting how children learn to use language with other people in their lives. As a result, we have come to not only lack basic facts about the full distribution of children's language input and use; we miss precisely those contexts that call for complex conversational skills, such as adapting to novel interlocutors and maintaining conversations without parent scaffolding.