@article{bala-etal-2026-pragmatic,
    title = "Pragmatic Modelling in Language Learning: Caregiver Question-Answer Feedback in Child-Directed Dialogue",
    author = "Bala, Maryam  and
      Heim, Johannes  and
      Edelstein, Elspeth  and
      Sinclair, Arabella",
    editor = "Piperidis, Stelios  and
      Bel, N{\'u}ria  and
      van den Heuvel, Henk  and
      Ide, Nancy  and
      Krek, Simon  and
      Toral, Antonio",
    journal = "International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation",
    volume = "main",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.897/",
    pages = "11461--11478",
    abstract = "In language development, children learn to form Question{--}Answer (QA) sequences through caregiver feedback that adapts dynamically to their evolving linguistic abilities. Using expert annotated child-caregiver interaction, we examine four feedback types that guide children{'}s acquisition of adult-like QA behaviour: caregiver instructions through reformulating and affirming a child{'}s output as well as caregiver demonstrations through exemplifying and modelling adult-like behaviour. Our analysis reveals that feedback incidence, frequency and complexity progress and adapt over the course of development, akin to a tailored curriculum for pragmatic development. We release our annotated dataset which offers a rich resource for studying pragmatic feedback and provides the first large-scale empirical evidence of adaptive, tailored caregiver feedback on QA behaviour."
}