Canada

Children start to communicate and use language in social interactions from the very early stages in development. This allows them to experiment with their current linguistic knowledge and receive valuable feedback from their interlocutors. We conducted a large-scale corpus study to examine the quality of positive and negative Communicative Feedback signals that caregivers provide in terms of time-contingent responses and clarification requests. We found evidence for the effect of such feedback in supporting children’s production of intelligible speech.
The broad impact of this paper is to highlight how general social feedback mechanisms that govern human communication can also support child language acquisition.

CogSci 2022

Communicative Feedback as a Mechanism Supporting the Production of Intelligible Speech in Early Childhood

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Do children learn language from the words that they produce themselves? Because children know that they have imperfect knowledge of language, they could simply ignore their own productions. However, children could also learn from their productions -- using what they say and how their caregivers respond to update their language models. Using irregular plurals as a case study, we conducted a large-scale corpus analysis and two experimental studies to understand the role of children's productions and caregivers' responses in language learning. We demonstrate that children do learn from their own production, with errorful utterances leading to more errors. However, at least in some contexts, children can use implicit corrections from parents to offset the negative effects of their errors. Children thus appear to learn not only from their caregivers' productions, but also from their own productions and from the relationship between the two.

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Communicative Feedback as a Mechanism Supporting the Production of Intelligible Speech in Early Childhood

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Of mouses and mans: the role of production and feedback in language learning

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