Three Stages in The Acquisition of English Response Tokens: A Window into the Development of Common Ground

This paper presents a longitudinal study of response tokens from one British English-speaking child aged 10 to 60 months. We demonstrate that response tokens can serve as a linguistic window into the development of common ground. Based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of response tokens, including adjacency markers, repetitions, hesitation markers, repair requests, as well as verbal and non-verbal backchannels, a proposal is made for the development of common ground. It is shown that response tokens expand incrementally in frequency and lexical diversity, specifically three stages are identified. Initially, the child only marks responses without situating them in the child´s set of beliefs (their epistemic ground). From 28 months on, the child then signals agreement in addition to marking response. This is interpreted as signaling the emergence of a preliminary concept of common ground — one that does not distinguish between speaker and addressee’s beliefs. From 41 months on, the child begins to show nuanced forms of agreement and disagreement, which reflects a separation of speaker and addressee’s beliefs. Only at this stage, response marking will resemble adult common ground management. It is concluded that the different stages in the use of response tokens mirrors different stages in the development of common ground construction and management.