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{
    "pk": 49151,
    "title": "Initiation Asymmetry in the Ontogenesis of Social Routines: In Conversation, Caregivers Scaffold 1-Year Olds to Respond, but 2-year Olds Initiate",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Social routine words — e.g. yes, no, hi, bye, okay, and thank you — are among the first words children learn across different languages and they help constitute a foundational set of actions for conducting social interactions. Despite this, we know little about how these words are acquired. In this paper we begin by showing that social routine words are systematically acquired earlier than statistical models of word acquisition predict. Furthermore, we argue this gap is due to a selective focus of word learning science on reference — how words are mapped onto concepts and events — a relationship which is absent for social routine words. Rather than looking at the properties of words per se, we address this gap by instead looking at how children become conversational partners. Enroute to becoming a conversational partner, a child must orient themselves to others' expectations about the position & composition of their turns relative to their social partner's. We hypothesize that second pair parts (turns which respond, e.g. agreeing, acknowledging, reciprocating a greeting, etc.) afford more scaffolding from caregivers than first pair parts, and therefore words used to compose such responses are more learnable. To support this hypothesis, we sampled 1,442 conversational turns from 5 mother-child dyads (12mo-28mo) and manually labeled the position of these turns within adjacency pairs. We found that 12-month-old's talk is made mainly in response to caregivers who initiate adjacency pairs, but this initiation asymmetry in conversation disappears by 28-months. Because social routine words either stereotypically or frequently are used to compose second position turns, this pattern of initiation asymmetry could explain their early acquisition. More generally, our observation likely reflects a transition from scaffolding to children's active learning.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "Papers with Oral Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58z60167",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Jack",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Terwilliger",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, San Diego",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Federico",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Rossano",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, San Diego",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T13:00:00-05:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
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            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49151/galley/37112/download/"
        },
        {
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            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49151/galley/38657/download/"
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}