Communicative Feedback in Language Acquisition

Abstract

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 -- often more knowledgeable -- interlocutors. While research in language acquisition has focused a great deal on children's ability to learn from the linguistic input or social cues, very little work has investigated the nature and role of communicative feedback, a process that results from children and caregivers trying to coordinate mutual understanding.In this work, we 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 that have been pursued separately. Further, it points towards several gaps in the literature that, we believe, should be addressed in future research in order to achieve a more complete understanding of language acquisition within and through social interaction.