Modelling the Informativeness of Non-Verbal Cues in Parent–Child Interaction

Non-verbal cues from speakers, such as eye gaze and hand positions, play an important role in word learning. This is consistent with the notion that for meaning to be reconstructed, acoustic patterns need to be linked to time-synchronous patterns from at least one other modality. In previous studies of a multimodally annotated corpus of parent–child interaction, we have shown that parents interacting with infants at the early word-learning stage (7–9 months) display a large amount of time-synchronous patterns, but that this behaviour tails off with increasing age of the children. Furthermore, we have attempted to quantify the informativeness of the different nonverbal cues, that is, to what extent they actually help to discriminate between different possible referents, and how critical the timing of the cues is. The purpose of this paper is to generalise our earlier model by quantifying informativeness resulting from non-verbal cues occurring both before and after their associated verbal references.Modelling the emergence of linguistic structures in early childhoo