Backchannel Behavior in Child-Caregiver Video Calls

Abstract

An important step in children’s socio-cognitive development is learning how to engage in coordinated conversations. This requires not only becoming competent speakers but also active listeners. This paper studies children’s use of backchannel signaling (e.g., ”yeah!” or a head nod) when in the listener’s role during conversations with their caregivers via Zoom. While previous work had found backchannel to be still immature in middle childhood, our use of both more natural/spontaneous conversational settings and more adequate controls allowed us to reveal that school-age children are strikingly close to adult-level mastery in many measures of backchanneling. The broader impact of this paper is to highlight the crucial role of social context in evaluating children’s conversational abilities.

Predicting Backchannel Signaling in Child-Caregiver Multimodal Conversations

“…As a data acquisition method, they capitalized on the recent increase in familiarity and use of online video calls by children -due to Covid-19 pandemic -to record video calls between children and their caregivers at home while playing a simple, intuitive verbal game. In contrast to previous studies, [4] found that children aged 6 to 12 years old produced BC at a rate that was comparable to that of adults.…”

“…We investigate children's level of BC mastery in terms of collaborative production and elicitation of BC, using the same corpus of conversations analyzed in [4]. When children are in the listening mode, we measure their ability to react consistently to the speaker's inviting cues.…”

“…The few existing studies [e.g., 11,23] indicated that children's BC skills were still limited and far from having achieved adult-like maturity. However, a more recent work by [4] argued that these previous studies might have under-estimated children's competence due probably to the -less than optimal -context of data collection (e.g., having an adult stranger as the child's conversational partner, using a scripted dialog, holding the conversation in the lab as opposed to children's homes) and research on adults has shown that the way people tend to use various conversational mechanisms, including backchannels, depends on the context of the conversation [10].…”

Caregivers Exaggerate Their Lexical Alignment to Young Children Across Several Cultures

“…Another limitation is that we focused only on one aspect of alignment (lexical repetition) which provides a partial view of how interlocutors align to each other multimodally in social interaction (Rasenberg et al, 2020). A more comprehensive investigation would require using child-caregiver corpora that facilitate the study of multimodal face-toface conversations (e.g., Bodur et al, 2021Bodur et al, , 2022.…”

Contingency in Child-Caregiver Naturalistic Conversation: Evidence for Mutual Influence

“…Besides, the annotation relied primarily on verbal data. In future research, we will extend this work both via automatic labeling to test the scalability of the findings (e.g., Cervone and Riccardi, 2020; and via using corpora that allow for the study of multimodal signaling (e.g., Bodur et al, 2021Bodur et al, , 2022.…”