{"pk":28694,"title":"Parents’ Linguistic Alignment Predicts Children’s Language Development","subtitle":null,"abstract":"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.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Language acquisition; statistical modeling; vocab-ulary development"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88t7c1sn","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Joseph","middle_name":"","last_name":"Denby","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":"2019-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28694/galley/18565/download/"}]}