Children start to communicate and use language in social interactions from a very young age. This allows them to experiment with their developing linguistic knowledge and receive valuable feedback from their interlocutors. While research in language acquisition has focused a great deal on children’s ability to learn from the linguistic input or social cues, little work, in comparison, has investigated the nature and role of Communicative Feedback, a process that results from children and caregivers trying to coordinate mutual understanding. In this presentation, I will draw on insights from theories of communicative coordination to formalize a mechanism for language acquisition: We argue that children can improve their linguistic knowledge in conversation by leveraging explicit or implicit signals of communication success or failure. This new formalization provides a common framework for several lines of research in child development and will enable us to obtain a more complete understanding of language acquisition within and through social interaction. Finally, I will present a recent corpus study that highlights the role of Communicative Feedback as a mechanism supporting the production of intelligible speech in early childhood as well as preliminary results regarding the role of such feedback mechanisms for learning the grammar of one’s native language.
Mitja Nikolaus is currently finishing his PhD with Abdellah Fourtassi at Aix-Marseille University. Mitja is a cognitive scientist who uses machine learning to study how children acquire language. He’s especially interested in communicative feedback and multimodal learning.