new paper out with @ashleycleung.bsky.social and dan yurovsky in child development! 📄🔓: doi.org/10.1111/cdev... brief 🧵 below on our findings! - ThreadSky

rdhawkins.bsky.social • 102 days ago

new paper out with @ashleycleung.bsky.social and dan yurovsky in child development!

📄🔓: http://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14186

brief 🧵 below on our findings!

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rdhawkins.bsky.social•102 days ago

1/7: we were interested in how kids form *conversational pacts*, or temporary agreements about how to refer to things with a partner. classic work has found that kids struggle to coordinate with other kids their own age, but recent findings have been more mixed. what's going on here?! 🧐

rdhawkins.bsky.social•102 days ago

2/7: ashley paired up 4-8yo children + parents to play a reference game with tangram shapes and found that parents naturally scaffold their kids' communication in clever ways - asking clarifying questions, proposing helpful labels, and prompting kids to expand when their descriptions are unclear.

rdhawkins.bsky.social•102 days ago

3/7: 💡 key insight: it *isn't* that younger kids are unable to adapt to what others are saying (they're actually quite good at adopting labels after they're proposed by their parents!) rather, it seems like they have trouble producing sufficiently informative referential descriptions on their own.

rdhawkins.bsky.social•102 days ago

4/7: ashley confirmed this hypothesis in a pair of clever follow up experiments replaying referring expressions from the game for naive groups of kids and showing that they were able to comprehend just as well as adults (Exp 2) ...

rdhawkins.bsky.social•102 days ago

5/7: but aren't really sensitive to context when it comes to production (Exp 3). when describing familiar objects like dogs or tables, kids often use the same label regardless of context - even when they need to be more specific to avoid confusion.

rdhawkins.bsky.social•102 days ago

6/7: we think this may provide a view into how parents help model good communication practices and guide kids toward more informative descriptions. over time, kids may get better at initiating these strategies themselves.

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