Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Social interaction plays a key role in children's development of language structure and use. In particular, children must successfully navigate the complex task of coordinating their communicative intents with people around them in early conversations. This study leveraged advanced NLP techniques to analyze a large corpus of child-caregiver conversations in the wild, combining methods for communicative intent inference and for turn contingency evaluation. Key findings include the prevalence of classic adjacency pairs like question-response; caregivers initiated the overwhelming majority of these sequences. We also document new developmental shifts in intent expression and an interesting dissociation between frequency vs. well-coordinated use across the early years of development. This framework offers a new approach to studying language development in its naturalistic, social context.