Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children learning their mother tongue engage in interactive communication starting from the early stages of their development. In a large-scale study of transcribed child-caregiver conversations, we investigated the role of Communicative Feedback in response to children's grammatical errors. We found evidence for both positive and negative feedback signals that are useful for learning the grammar of one's native language: Caregivers are more likely to provide acknowledgments if an utterance is grammatical, and they are more likely to ask for clarification if an utterance is ungrammatical. Further, we investigate how children react in response to negative communicative feedback signals and find evidence that grammaticality is improved in direct follow-ups to negative feedback signals. This study provides the largest and most comprehensive evidence supporting the presence and effectiveness of communicative feedback signals in grammar learning, broadening the literature on communicative feedback in language acquisition more generally.