Unraveling the dyad: Using recurrence analysis to explore patterns of syntactic coordination between children and caregivers in conversation

Recurrence analysis is introduced as a means to investigate syntactic coordination between child and caregiver. Three CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) corpora are analyzed and demonstrate coordination between children and their caregivers in terms of word-class n-gram sequences. Results further indicate that trade-offs in leading or following this coordination reflect individual differences between children at varying levels of development. Further analyses characterize the syntactic patterns that are coordinated, and results are consistent with recent language acquisition research on syntax acquisition. Overall, recurrence analysis reveals that there is a process of child-caregiver coordination taking place in ongoing conversation at the level of syntactic description.