Parents scaffold the formation of conversational pacts with their children

Adults readily form conversational pacts, or temporary agreements about referent names, over the course of conversation. Young children notoriously have difficulty forming pacts with peers, but the root cause of such difficulty has remained unclear. Here, we aim to tease apart the component processes of referential pact formation that may be implicated. In Experiment 1, we show that children (ages 4, 6, 8) are, in fact, able to coordinate on increasingly accurate and efficient pacts with parents in a director-matcher task. We analyze the interactional features that account for their success, finding that parents spontaneously initiate more clarification exchanges with younger children who, in turn, are more likely to adapt to labels introduced by the parent. We then examine whether the benefit of such interactional scaffolding primarily emerges through overcoming childrens' difficulties with comprehension (Experiment 2) or production (Experiment 3). Contrary to classical views attributing childrens' coordination failures to lexical rigidity or perspective-taking, these result support the idea that children readily form pacts when scaffolding from parents helps overcome their production difficulties.