Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adults readily form pacts, or temporary agreements about ref-erent names, over the course of conversation. Young childrenfail to do so with peers, but recent evidence suggests that ex-plicit feedback from adults may improve their performance(Matthews, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2007). Do parents natu-rally provide such structure in their conversations with chil-dren? Using a director-matcher paradigm, we first show thatparents and children (ages 4, 6, 8) converge on increasinglyaccurate and efficient conversational pacts. Further, parents ofyounger children provide more interactive feedback. Finally,we analyze asymmetries in parents’ and children’s contribu-tions, finding that pacts tend to originate with the parent, butare simplified by younger children. Together, these resultssupport the idea that parents sensitively adapt their languageto their children’s developmental level to scaffold successfulcommunication.