Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children do not learn language from passive observation ofthe world, but from interaction with caregivers who want tocommunicate with them. These communicative exchanges arestructured at multiple levels in ways that support support lan-guage learning. We argue this pedagogically supportive struc-ture can result from pressure to communicate successfully witha linguistically immature partner. We first characterize onekind of pedagogically supportive structure in a corpus analy-sis: caregivers provide more information-rich referential com-munication, using both gesture and speech to refer to a singleobject, when that object is rare and when their child is young.Then, in an iterated reference game experiment on MechanicalTurk (n = 480), we show how this behavior can arise from pres-sure to communicate successfully with a less knowledgeablepartner. Lastly, we show that speaker behavior in our experi-ment can be explained by a rational planning model, withoutany explicit teaching goal. We suggest that caregivers’ desireto communicate successfully may play a powerful role in struc-turing children’s input in order to support language learning.