{"pk":28535,"title":"Parents Calibrate Speech to Their Children’s Vocabulary Knowledge","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Young children learn language at an incredible rate. Whilechildren come prepared with powerful statistical learningmechanisms, the statistics they encounter are also prepared forthem: Children learn from caregivers motivated to communi-cate with them. Do caregivers modify their speech in orderto support children’s comprehension? We asked children andtheir parents to play a simple reference game in which the par-ent’s goal was to guide their child to select a target animal froma set of three. We show that parents calibrate their referringexpressions to their children’s language knowledge, produc-ing more informative references for animals that they thoughttheir children did not know. Further, parents learn about theirchildren’s knowledge over the course of the game, and cali-brate their referring expressions accordingly. These results un-derscore the importance of understanding the communicativecontext in which language learning happens.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"parent-child interaction; language development;communication"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2t85207x","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Ashley","middle_name":"","last_name":"Leung","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":""},{"first_name":"Alexandra","middle_name":"","last_name":"Tunkel","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":""},{"first_name":"Daniel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yurovsky","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28535/galley/18406/download/"}]}