The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and English, 2 typologically distinct languages. They found that children learn to speak in language-specific ways from age 3 onward (i.e., English speakers used 1 clause and Turkish speakers used 2 clauses to express manner and path). In contrast, English- and Turkish-speaking children's gestures looked similar at ages 3 and 5 (i.e., separate gestures for manner and path), differing from each other only at age 9 and in adulthood (i.e., English speakers used 1 gesture, but Turkish speakers used separate gestures for manner and path). The authors argue that this pattern of the development of cospeech gestures reflects a gradual shift to language-specific representations during speaking and shows that looking at speech alone may not be sufficient to understand the full process of language acquisition.

This paper assesses discourse pragmatics as a potential explanation for the production and omission of arguments in early child language. It employs a set of features that characterize typical situations of informativeness (Greenfield and Smith 1976; Clancy 1993, 1997) to examine argument status in data from four children aged 2;0 through 3;6 learning Inuktitut as a first language. Results based on logistic regression analyses suggest that a discourse-pragmatics account of argument representation has good explanatory adequacy, and that several of the features characterizing informativeness are good indicators of those arguments that tend to be overtly produced rather than omitted in early child language.

One potential challenge for children learning Inuktitut comes from the ergative case marking system, because of the contrast between the ergative system in morphology and the accusative system governing syntax. However, no studies have yet been published focusing on how Inuktitut-speaking children acquire ergativity. In this chapter, we investigate this process using naturalistic spontaneous speech data from four Inuktitut-speaking children aged 2;0–3;6. We find that these children largely avoid producing structures that require ergative morphology. Analysis of caregiver speech and spoken narratives from older children and adults shows that this avoidance occurs regardless of age. We conclude that Inuktitut may be in the process of historical change from an ergative-absolutive system to a nominative-accusative system, and that the children’s language reflects that change.

Passive structures are typically assumed to be one of the later acquired constructions in child language. English-speaking children have been shown to produce and comprehend their first simple passive structures productively by about age four and to master more complex structures by about age nine. Recent crosslinguistic data have shown that this pattern may not hold across languages of varying structures. This paper presents data from four Inuit children aged 2;0 to 3;6 that shows relatively early acquisition of both simple and complex forms of the passive. Within this age range children are productively producing truncated, full, action and experiential passives. Some possible reasons for this precociousness are explored including adult input and language structure.