# How Adults Understand What Young Children Say

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07807 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07807/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Cognitive Science in the era of Artificial Intelligence: A roadmap for reverse-engineering the infant language-learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08723/) (2016)
- [Revisiting the Uniform Information Density Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11635/) (2021)
- [Superbizarre Is Not Superb: Derivational Morphology Improves BERT's Interpretation of Complex Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00403/) (2021)
- [Structured abbreviation expansion in context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01140/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Models of Robust Word Recognition with Serial Reproduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09788/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Open-domain Paradox for Chatbots: Common Ground as the Basis for Human-like Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11708/) (2023)
- [Filling in the Mechanisms: How do LMs Learn Filler-Gap Dependencies under Developmental Constraints?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14459/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how these adult inferences as listeners reflect sophisticated beliefs about what children are trying to communicate, as well as how children are likely to pronounce words. Using a Bayesian framework for modeling spoken word recognition, we find that computational models can replicate adult interpretations of children's speech only when they include strong, context-specific prior expectations about the messages that children will want to communicate. This points to a critical role of adult cognitive processes in supporting early communication and reveals how children can actively prompt adults to take actions on their behalf even when they have only a nascent understanding of the adult language. We discuss the wide-ranging implications of the powerful listening capabilities of adults for theories of first language acquisition.