How Adults Understand What Young Children Say
This research addresses the problem of understanding early language acquisition for developmental psychology and cognitive science, revealing how adult cognitive processes support communication with children.
The study investigated how adults interpret children's early speech by using a Bayesian modeling framework, finding that accurate replication of adult interpretations requires strong, context-specific prior expectations about children's intended messages.
Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how these adult inferences as listeners reflect sophisticated beliefs about what children are trying to communicate, as well as how children are likely to pronounce words. Using a Bayesian framework for modeling spoken word recognition, we find that computational models can replicate adult interpretations of children's speech only when they include strong, context-specific prior expectations about the messages that children will want to communicate. This points to a critical role of adult cognitive processes in supporting early communication and reveals how children can actively prompt adults to take actions on their behalf even when they have only a nascent understanding of the adult language. We discuss the wide-ranging implications of the powerful listening capabilities of adults for theories of first language acquisition.