Children’s multimodal feedback practices across cultures: A lens on social-cognitive development

Abstract

Adult recipients are understood to be active participants in conversation who co-construct talk using feedback signals. However, the ways in which children produce feedback to signal their active participation in interaction remain underexplored in developmental pragmatics. To address this gap, this paper presents an initial exploration of children’s use of multimodal feedback signals based on video corpora recorded in naturalistic contexts across four linguistically and culturally diverse settings: Datooga (Tanzania), Qaqet (Papua New Guinea), Bolivian Amazonian Spanish (Bolivia), and American English (USA). This study provides exploratory evidence of young children’s feedback behavior within social interactions across cultures, and suggests differences in comparison to adults’ multimodal feedback behaviors. Our findings reveal that young children (aged 2–6 years) produce less feedback than adults, suggesting a potentially higher tolerance for non-progressivity and breakdowns in interaction. They appear to make fewer explicit attempts to signal shared understanding or to indicate that they are monitoring their interlocutor’s speech. Nonetheless, children across our sample do provide feedback: they produce some non-repair feedback and employ repair initiators. Our observations indicate that young children use multimodal practices in the production of feedback signals significantly less often than adults. Given the overall research gap in the developmental literature, we provide tentative explanations for the observed patterns and their implications for cognitive development. Integrating insights from developmental psychology, we propose, among other things, that children’s use of non-repair feedback relates to the development of Theory of Mind, as these practices require a nuanced understanding of others’ mental states. On the other hand, the limited use of embodied practices in children’s feedback production hints at the progressive development of multimodal languaging in children. These findings contribute to our understanding of cognitive development and language acquisition, shedding light on the development of multimodal interactional mechanisms in childhood.