How Adults Understand What Young Children Say

TL;DR

This paper explores how adults interpret young children's speech using a Bayesian model, highlighting the importance of prior expectations and cognitive processes in early communication understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a computational Bayesian framework that explains adult interpretation of children's speech, emphasizing the role of context-specific priors.

Findings

Models replicate adult interpretations only with strong priors

Adult cognition plays a critical role in early language comprehension

Children influence adult actions through nascent speech signals

Abstract

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.