Our results show just how strongly early communication may be supported by adults & their powerful inferential abilities. It also opens new questions for lang development: how can young children learn from what adults say/do in response to their early speech? Stay tuned! 7/

It’s worth being up front about a limitation in our approach: what we called the “right answer” for what word the child said was what transcribers’ thought they said. This is an imperfect proxy for what parents think their child is saying, but a reasonable first step. 6/

We’re calling this adult adaptation to what children talk about and how they are likely to talk about things “child-directed listening.” This complements a long history of research on how adults speak to children. 5/

A phonetic-only model—without any info on larger communicative context—only agreed with adult listeners 42% of the time. The difference suggests that adult expectations are hugely important for understanding children! 4/

Our best model guessed what words adult transcribers thought kids said with > 90% accuracy. This model used a BERT-based language model that could take advantage of what had  been said by parent and child and what kids like to talk about (cats, not mortgages) 3/

To test our hypotheses about what matters in understanding children, @ruthe.bsky.social, Nicole Wong, @bergelsonlab.bsky.social, @rplevy.bsky.social & I made some new language models to guess what words English-learning 1-4 year olds said in a set of transcriptions of at-home recordings 2/