Anaphora, a ubiquitous feature of natural language, poses a particular challenge to young children as they first learn lan- guage due to its referential ambiguity. Through an eye-tracking study in a naturalistic free-play context, we examine the strategies that parents employ to calibrate their use of anaphora to their child's linguistic development level. We show that, in this way, parents are able to intuitively scaffold the complexity of their speech such that greater referential ambiguity does not hurt overall communication success.
@inproceedings{falketal21cogsci,
title={Parents Adaptively Use Anaphora During Parent-child Social Interaction},
author={Jasmine Falk and Yayun Zhang and Matthias Scheutz and Chen Yu},
year={2021},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Annual Cognitive Science Conference},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/falketal21cogsci.pdf}
}