Johannes Heim
2026
Pragmatic Modelling in Language Learning: Caregiver Question-Answer Feedback in Child-Directed Dialogue
Maryam Bala | Johannes Heim | Elspeth Edelstein | Arabella Sinclair
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Maryam Bala | Johannes Heim | Elspeth Edelstein | Arabella Sinclair
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
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.