Communicative Feedback as a Mechanism Supporting the Production of Intelligible Speech in Early Childhood

Children start to communicate and use language in social interactions from the very early stages in development. This allows them to experiment with their current linguistic knowledge and receive valuable feedback from their interlocutors. We conducted a large-scale corpus study to examine the quality of positive and negative Communicative Feedback signals that caregivers provide in terms of time-contingent responses and clarification requests. We found evidence for the effect of such feedback in supporting children’s production of intelligible speech. The broad impact of this paper is to highlight how general social feedback mechanisms that govern human communication can also support child language acquisition.