Scaffolding of Language Development via Conversational Overlap

1. Scaffolding of Language Development via Conversational Overlap Patricia J. Brooks CHILDES • TalkBank •Competition •Emergentism June 8, 2019

2. Collaborators: Maria Alarcon & Elizabeth Che

3. The Joy of Teaching with CHILDES • Engage students in open data science • Organize data into spreadsheets • Visualize data • Replicate results across corpora

4. Ambrose-Moeller Corpus • Collected by Sophie Ambrose and Mary Pat Moeller. Boys Town National Research Hospital  • Normal Hearing (N=18) • Hearing Loss (N=22; 15 with cochlear implants) Ages: 13.5, 18, 22.5, 27, 36m • Scenario: free play (video) Ambrose, S. E. (2016). Gesture use in 14-month-old toddlers with hearing loss and their mothers’ responses. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 25, 519–531.

5. Building a Spreadsheet

6. Relationship of MLU and Word Types

7. New England Corpus • Collected by Catherine Snow, Barbara Pan, AnatNinio& Pamela Rollins Harvard Graduate School of Education • Lower and upper middle SES • Ages: 14, 20, 32 mo (N=36) • Scenario: free play (4 boxes) Ninio, A., Snow, C., Pan, B., & Rollins, P. (1994). Classifying communicative acts in children’s interactions. Journal of Communications Disorders, 27, 157-188.

8. Bates Corpus • Collected by Elizabeth Bates with Inge Bretherton Boulder, CO between 1978 and 1980 • Middle Class Sample Ages: 20, 28 mo (N=28) • Scenario: free play (plus book and snack) Bates, E., Bretherton, I., & Snyder, L. (1988). From first words to grammar: Individual differences and dissociable mechanisms. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

9. Imitation in Parent-Child Interaction • Speakers and listeners tend to use the same lexical expressions; such alignment helps to establish common ground. (Garrod & Clark, 1993) • Utterances of mothers and toddlers tend to overlap in content, which may serve to ratify and acknowledge the partner’s efforts. (Clark & Bernicot, 2008)

10. Imitation in Parent-Child Interaction Role-reversal imitation is a means of building a communicative repertoire: Toddlers perform the same actions toward their caregivers as their caregivers performed toward them, but with roles reversed. (Tomasello, 1999)

11. Imitation in Parent-Child Interaction Parental imitation provides critical feedback: Maternal imitation of infant vocalizations at 13 months predicts future milestones: 50 words, combinatorial speech, past-event talk (Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, & Baumwell, 2001)

12. Using CHIP to Measure Conversational Overlap CHIP command (Sokolov & MacWhinney, 1990) compares words across two specified utterances to determine the extent of lexical overlap: • “Source” utterance (adult or child) • “Response” utterance (adult or child) Sokolov, J. L., & MacWhinney, B. (1990). The CHIP framework: Automatic coding and analysis of parent-child conversational interaction. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 22(2), 151-161.

13. CHIP Command and Output

14. CHIP Analysis Tiers ADU: Adult response to a child utterance • Child utterance is the source and the adult utterance is the response. CHI: Child response to an adult utterance • Adult utterance is the source and the child utterance is the response. ASR: Adult self repetition • Adult utterances are the source and response. CSR: Child self repetition • Child utterances are the source and response.

15. CHIP Summary Statistics %_Overlap: Percentage of utterances with lexical content that overlapped with the previous utterance (out of total # of utterances).

16. How Common is Conversational Overlap? • To what extent do children produce utterances that overlap in words with what their caregiver has just said? • To what extent do caregivers produce utterances that overlap in words with what their child has just said? • Does it change over time?

17. Ambrose-Moeller Corpus: Proportion of Overlap

18. New England Corpus: Proportion of Overlap

19. Bates Corpus: Proportion of Overlap

20. What Does Overlap Look Like? • To what extent do children and caregivers elaborate and add words to what their partner has just said? • To what extent do children and caregivers simplify or delete words from what their partner has just said? Sokolov, J. L. (1993). A local contingency analysis of the fine-tuning hypothesis. Developmental Psychology, 29(6), 1008-1023.

21. New England #16 CHIP Transcript Excerpt at 32 months *MOT: okay . *CHI: okay . %chi: $EXA:okay $EXACT $DIST = 2 $REP = 1.00 *CHI: and you can have this [= duck puppet] . *MOT: okay . %asr: $EXA:okay $EXACT $DIST = 5 $REP = 1.00 *CHI: you say (.) you want another cookie . %csr: $EXA:you $ADD:say-you-want-another-cookie $DEL:and $DEL:can-have-this $DIST = 3 $REP = 0.17 *MOT: do you want another cookie ? %adu: $EXA:you-want-another-cookie $ADD:do $DEL:say-you $DIST = 1 $REP = 0.80

22. Bates Corpus: Child Additions and Deletions

23. Bates Corpus: Maternal Additions and Deletions

24. Does Overlap Scaffold Language Development? • Does the caregiver’s rate of overlap predict their child’s language growth? • Does the child’s rate of overlap predict their language growth? Cross-lagged statistical analysis Che, E. S., Brooks, P. J., Alarcon, M. F., Yannaco, F. D., & Donnelly, S. (2018). Assessing the impact of conversational overlap in content on child language growth. Journal of Child Language, 45(1), 72-96.

25. New England Corpus: Cross-Lagged Correlations Child MLU at 32 mo as a function of Maternal Overlap at 20 months. Child VOCD at 32 mo as a function of Maternal Overlap at 20 months.

26. New England Corpus: Overlap at 20 m  MLU at 32 m

27. New England Corpus: Overlap at 20 m  DSS at 32 m Lee, L. (1974). Developmental Sentence Analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

28. Bates Corpus: Overlap at 20 m  MLU at 28 m

29. Bates Corpus: Overlap at 20 m  DSS at 28 m Lee, L. (1974). Developmental Sentence Analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

30. Ambrose/Moeller Corpus: Overlap at 18 m  MLU at 27 m

31. Ambrose/Moeller Corpus: Overlap at 18 m  DSS at 27 m Lee, L. (1974). Developmental Sentence Analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

32. Ambrose/Moeller Corpus: Overlap at 27 m  MLU at 36 m

33. Ambrose/Moeller Corpus: Overlap at 27 m  DSS at 36 m Lee, L. (1974). Developmental Sentence Analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

34. Summary of Key Findings • Maternal overlap predicts growth in the child’s MLU and DSS. • Its impact is apparent at age 18-20 months, when multiword combinatorial speech is first emerging. • Child overlap does not predict growth in the complexity of their speech (or the diversity of their vocabularies). • Higher rates of child overlap may be associated with less complex speech (at age 36 months).

35. Social Shaping • Our findings align with Social Shaping hypothesis that just-in-time social feedback encourages infants’ communicative efforts, but at older ages than previously reported. • At age 8 to 15 months, maternal contingent responding to babble has been shown to increase the number of mother-directed communicative bids (Gros-Louis, West & King, 2014), and the quality and quantity of infant vocalizations (Goldstein & Schwade, 2008).

36. Future Directions • Growth curve models may help to shed light on when the effects of maternal overlap dissipate. • Analyses with late talkers (Weismer corpus) suggest that effects of maternal overlap vary by child language ability more than by age. (Che, Alarcon, Yannaco, & Brooks, 2016) • More research is needed on how specific functions of overlap (e.g., ratification, correction, grounding of new information) support language development. (Clark & Bernicot, 2008)

37. Thank You! patricia.brooks@csi.cuny.edu