Caregivers Exaggerate Their Lexical Alignment to Young Children Across Several Cultures

International audience As soon as they start producing their first words, children engage in dialogues with people around them. Recent work has suggested that caregivers facilitate this early linguistic communication via frequently re-using and building on children's own words. This tendency decreases over development as children become more competent speakers. While this pattern has been observed with data of Englishlearning children, the question remains as to whether this early child-caregiver dynamics is universal vs. culture-specific. We address this question using large-scale data in six languages belonging to both Eastern and Western cultures. We found that the finding generalizes well cross-linguistically, suggesting that caregivers' early "exaggerating" of lexical alignment is likely a scaffolding strategy used across cultures to facilitate children's early linguistic communication and learning.