How Adults Understand What Young Children Say. (arXiv:2206.07807v1 [cs.CL])

Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to adult speech in
form or content, and yet caregivers often find meaning in young children's
utterances. Precisely how caregivers are able to do this remains poorly
understood. We propose that successful early communication (an essential
building block of language development) relies not just on children's growing
linguistic knowledge, but also on adults' sophisticated inferences. These
inferences, we further propose, are optimized for fine-grained details of how
children speak. We evaluate these ideas …

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