How do children learn to use feedback signals to co-construct talk and become active participants in a conversation? How does young children’s high tolerance for non-progressivity and communicative breakdowns change over time? Which strategies are evoked in communication in multilingual contexts and in languages other than first or family languages? To answer these and other questions, we are engaged in on-going cross-corpus research.

Listen to two Qaqet children use feedback signals:

We observe extremely few feedback signals used by 3-year-old children across our corpora – mostly open requests (‘huh?’) and other repair strategies, but hardly any response tokens such as continuers or acknowledgements (‘mm’, head nods, eye gaze) or newsmarkers (‘oh?’, laughter). With one exception: the Qaqet corpus. Qaqet children regularly produce such response tokens from age 2 onwards. It is very likely that socialization practices are responsible for this pattern, as Qaqet adults use a salient routine that actively elicits feedback from children.

Source: Alice Mitchell, Anastasia Bauer & Birgit Hellwig. 2023. A first cross-linguistic foray into children’s feedback signals. Talk given at the 45th Annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), March 7-10 2023, Cologne.