Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The question of how children develop multimodal coordination skills to engage in meaningful face-to-face conversations is crucial for our broader understanding of children's healthy socio-cognitive development. Here we focus on investigating the ability of school-age children to coordinate turns with their interlocutors, especially regarding when to take the floor (i.e., the main channel of the conversation) and when to provide attentive listening signals via the back channel. Using data of child-caregiver naturalistic conversations and data-driven research tools, we found that children aged 6 to 12 years old already show adult-like behavior both in terms of reacting to the relevant channel-specific cues and in terms of providing reliable, multimodal inviting cues to help their interlocutor select the most appropriate channel of the conversation.