On the acquisition of complex predicates : introduction to the special issue

There may be two approaches to diversifying the languages cited in child language acquisition research: a theoretical canon approach and a language-specific approach. The ‘theoretical canon’ approach recruits out-of-the-way languages into long-standing theoretical debates to either validate current assumptions using a new language and population, or utilize a feature of the new language as a wedge with which to separate two opposing theories (see Cutler, 1985, on this notion in psycholinguistics). For instance, passive constructions have been known to be produced late by English-speaking children at least since Brown (1973), but studies show that children learning K’iche’ (Pye & Poz, 1988), Zulu (Suzman, 1987), Sesotho (Demuth, 1990), and Inuktitut (Allen & Crago, 1996) produce them relatively early, implying that language-specific factors like formation and frequency in the ambient language must be at play, not anything inherent about passives.