Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Young children learn language at an incredible rate. Whilechildren come prepared with powerful statistical learningmechanisms, the statistics they encounter are also prepared forthem: Children learn from caregivers motivated to communi-cate with them. Do caregivers modify their speech in orderto support children’s comprehension? We asked children andtheir parents to play a simple reference game in which the par-ent’s goal was to guide their child to select a target animal froma set of three. We show that parents calibrate their referringexpressions to their children’s language knowledge, produc-ing more informative references for animals that they thoughttheir children did not know. Further, parents learn about theirchildren’s knowledge over the course of the game, and cali-brate their referring expressions accordingly. These results un-derscore the importance of understanding the communicativecontext in which language learning happens.