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The practical relevance of neonatal imitation for social development has remained largely unaddressed as most studieshave been conducted in highly controlled, laboratory conditions. Utilizing the Lookit online infant experiment platform,we aim to demonstrate the feasibility of measuring neonatal imitation of caregivers in the home environment. Our between-subjects design, adapted from Meltzoff and Moore (1983), focuses on two of the most commonly studied neonatal gestures,tongue protrusion and mouth opening. Caregivers and their newborn are videotaped as caregivers model either gestureto their newborn. Coders, who are blind to condition, record newborns gesture frequencies. To analyze these data,we ultimately plan to specify a Bayesian hierarchical log-linear model testing whether the frequency of each neonatalgesture increased when caregivers modeled that specific gesture. Pilot data collection and behavioral coding are currentlyunderway and will focus on inter-rater reliability, attrition, and recruitment rates of online data collection for neonatalimitation.

Language that describes people in a concise manner may con-flict with social norms (e.g., referring to people by their race),presenting a conflict between transferring information effi-ciently and avoiding offensive language. When a speakeris describing others, we propose that listeners consider thespeaker’s use or absence of potentially offensive language toreason about the speaker’s goals. We formalize this hypothe-sis in a probabilistic model of polite pragmatic language un-derstanding, and use it to generate predictions about interpre-tations of utterances in ambiguous contexts, which we testempirically. We find that participants are sensitive to poten-tially offensive language when resolving ambiguity in refer-ence. These results support the idea that listeners representconflicts in speakers’ goals and use that uncertainty to inter-pret otherwise underspecified utterances.