Multimodal Communicative Behaviours in Shy Children in Assessment Situations and Social Evaluative Contexts

<jats:p>Shy children are characterised by reserved communicative behaviour, especially in novel situations or when interacting with unfamiliar interlocutors. Many of the contextual elicitors that trigger typical patterns of shyness reactions in children, such as gaze aversion, a more distant approach, or general hesitation, may be present in typical laboratory settings or in standardised testing situations, for example, language assessment tests. In our chapter, we review recent studies that operationalise shy children’s communicative behaviour at verbal and nonverbal levels with different social partners, such as humans or social robots, as interaction partners, providing practitioners with a sound overview of communicative signals that are challenging to capture and measure in practical settings. From this, we derive critical implications for the design of testing situations for children that allow them to unfold their communicative potential and demonstrate their linguistic competence, taking into account their individual temperamental characteristics.</jats:p>