Pragmatic Modelling in Language Learning: Caregiver Question-Answer Feedback in Child-Directed Dialogue

Abstract

In language development, children learn to form Question–Answer (QA) sequences through caregiver feedback that adapts dynamically to their evolving linguistic abilities. Using expert annotated child-caregiver interaction, we examine four feedback types that guide children’s acquisition of adult-like QA behaviour: caregiver instructions through reformulating and affirming a child’s output as well as caregiver demonstrations through exemplifying and modelling adult-like behaviour. Our analysis reveals that feedback incidence, frequency and complexity progress and adapt over the course of development, akin to a tailored curriculum for pragmatic development. We release our annotated dataset which offers a rich resource for studying pragmatic feedback and provides the first large-scale empirical evidence of adaptive, tailored caregiver feedback on QA behaviour.

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