Developmental Interest Group (DIG)

Putting interaction back into referential communication of preschoolers and infants

Humans refer to things, people, events using multimodal communication every day during interactions. The communicative task of referring appears straightforward, but it often is not and may be developmentally challenging to learn. Referential communication is an area where pragmatic knowledge, social-cognition, language knowledge and interactive communication have to work together. I will present some of the experimental and semi-naturalistic studies that our Language and Communication Development Lab conducted with preschoolers and infants about referential behavior.