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

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 for the Acquisition Sketch Project, an initiative in which Barb was a core member, we find both striking commonalities and clear differences in CDL across our target languages. The findings are consistent with the argument that CDL emerges as a set of culturally mediated behavioural practices, with some features being more commonly observed than others. The findings underline the value of the Acquisition Sketch approach in widening the evidence base of the field of child language acquisition, one of Barb’s major contributions to the field.