Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While children must learn language from the statistical structure of the input they receive, parents play a critical role shap-ing the structure of this input. Even without an explicit pedagogical goal, parents’ desire to communicate successfully maycause them to produce language calibrated to their child’s linguistic development. We designed a Mechanical Turk studyto experimentally validate this idea, putting Turkers in the role of parents talking with children less familiar with a novellanguage. Participants could communicate in 3 ways: pointingexpensive but unambiguous, labelingcheap but knowledge-dependent, or both. They won points only for communicating successfully. Participants adapted their communicativebehavior to their own knowledge and their partners knowledge. Teaching emerged when the speaker had more linguisticknowledge than their partner. We implemented a rational planning model that fits these data and demonstrates that suchpatterns could result from maximizing expected utilities, accounting for the expected utilities of future interactions.