Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studies have shown the importance of caregivers’ multimodal behaviours (e.g., prosody, gestures, gaze) on children’s word learning. However, most studies focus on only one specific behaviour (e.g., only prosody). Here, we investigate which multimodal behaviours used by caregivers best predict children’s word learning and vocabulary growth. Using data from the ECOLANG corpus, we analysed caregiver behaviour in semi-naturalistic interactions with their child (3 to 4 years old) in which they talked about known and unknown toys. We analysed caregivers’ (n=36) use of multimodal cues while labelling the objects, specifically their use of yes/no questions, pitch, representational gestures, pointing, object manipulations and gaze. Caregivers’ pitch, use of yes/no questions and pointing predicted children’s word learning. In particular, higher pitch when labelling unknown toys predicted immediate word learning. The degree to which caregivers used higher pitch when producing the label for known compared to unknown toys predicted both immediate learning and vocabulary growth. Furthermore, the degree to which caregivers used yes/no questions more for unknown toys predicted immediate learning, while the frequency of yes/no questions when naming unknown toys predicted vocabulary growth. Lastly, caregiver pointing also predicted immediate label learning and vocabulary growth, but in the opposite direction from prosody: the more they pointed towards known toys, the better children’s learning of novel toy labels. Other behaviours did not predict word learning. Overall, these results provide evidence for the important role of multimodal caregiver behaviours, particularly prosody, on children’s lexical development.