Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories of cognitive development emphasize the role of dyadic processes in language acquisition. Empirical research has focused on caregiver-child dyads at home, which does not facilitate teasing apart dyadic and individual processes. The preschool classroom is one understudied context in which the same child participates in multiple interactions. Here we disentangle sources of variance in children’s language using objectively measured peer speech in preschool classrooms.