A comparative study of child-directed language across five cultures based on data from the Acquisition Sketch Project

Abstract

Throughout the history of child language acquisition research, the study of child-directed language (CDL) has attracted significant attention. In particular, there has been considerable debate regarding the characteristic features of CDL and their universality/variability across the world’s languages. Yet, although data from many languages have been analyzed, the totality of the crosslinguistic coverage is still poor. In this paper, we report on an analysis of CDL across five diverse languages and cultures: Murrinhpatha (Southern Daly, non-Pama-Nyungan), Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan), Qaqet (Baining), Tagalog (Western Austronesian), and Inuktitut (Inuit-Yupik-Unangan). Using data collected f..