Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children quickly gain enormous linguistic knowledge duringearly development, in part due to low-level features of theirparents’ speech. Some posit that parents contribute to theirchild’s language development by tuning their own languageaccording to their child’s developmental abilities and needs(Bruner, 1985; Snow, 1972). Here, we investigate this hypoth-esis by examining ‘alignment’ at the level of syntax and func-tion words in a large-scale corpus of parent-child conversationsand measuring its association with language development out-comes. To do so, we employ a statistical model of alignment toestimate its presence in our dataset and its predictive impact ona measure of vocabulary development. Our results corroborateprevious findings, showing strong alignment for both parentsand children; in addition, we demonstrate that parental align-ment is a significant predictor of language maturity indepen-dent of demographic features, suggesting that parental tuninghas strong ties to a child’s language development.