Development of Multi-level Linguistic Alignment in Child-adult Conversations

Abstract

Interactive alignment is a major mechanism of linguistic coordination. Here we study the way this mechanism emerges in development across the lexical, syntactic, and conceptual levels. We leverage NLP tools to analyze a large-scale corpus of child-adult conversations between 2 and 5 years old. We found that, across development, children align consistently to adults above chance and that adults align consistently more to children than vice versa (even controlling for language production abilities). Besides these consistencies, we found a diversity of developmental trajectories across linguistic levels. These corpus-based findings provide strong support for an early onset of multi-level linguistic alignment in children and invite new experimental work.

Backchannel Behavior in Child-Caregiver Video Calls

“…Children and caregivers were recorded talking to each other through Zoom while both at home (but sitting in different rooms and using different personal devices). 2 Further, to evaluate children's BC behavior compared to adult-level mastery, we cannot rely solely on the caregiver's behavior in the same conversation because caregivers tend to adapt to children's linguistic and conversational competencies (e.g., Snow, 1972;Misiek et al, 2020;Fusaroli et al, 2021;Leung et al, 2021). Thus, in addition to child-caregiver conversations, we collect similar data of adult-adult conversations involving the same caregiver talking either to another family member or to a non-family member.…”

Caregivers Exaggerate Their Lexical Alignment to Young Children Across Several Cultures

“…Interestingly, a similar behavior has been documented in child-adult natural dialog, starting from the early stages of the child's language production (Dale and Spivey, 2006;Fernández and Grimm, 2014;Denby and Yurovsky, 2019;Fusaroli et al, 2021;Misiek et al, 2020;Yurovsky et al, 2016;Foushee et al, 2021).…”

“…In particular, two large-scale studies -using data from hundreds of children -by Yurovsky et al (2016) and Misiek et al (2020) converged on similar conclusions despite the fact they used different measures and focused on different aspects of alignment. The main finding was that caregivers exaggerate their re-use of children's early words/expressions when communicating with them.…”

BERT-Beta: A Proactive Probabilistic Approach to Text Moderation

“…Beta regression is originally proposed for modeling rate and proportion data (Ferrari and Cribari-Neto, 2004) by parameterizing mean and dispersion and regressing parameters of interest. It has been applied to evaluate grid search parameters in optimization (McKinney-Bock and Bedrick, 2019), model emotional dimensions (Aggarwal et al, 2020) and statistical processes of child-adult linguistic coordination and alignment (Misiek et al, 2020).…”