ABSTRACT
A lthough relative newcomers to the eld of child language, we have a long association with Dan Slobin stemming back to our graduate school days at Berkeley in the early 1970s. Dan was a frequent associate at the Language Behavior Research Lab, which housed linguistic anthropologists in those days. He had recently produced the ground-breaking A field manual for cross-cultural study of the acquisition of communicative competence (Slobin, 1967), which was the practical basis for a number of the rst PhD dissertations examining child language development in non-Western societies (e.g., Stross, 1969; Mitchell-Kernan, 1972), was helpful in our own eld research directed at adults in Mexico and in Tamilnadu, India, and has inspired a succession of such eld manuals from the MPI, Nijmegen. Little did we realize then that, some 30 years later, Dan would still be a major intellectual stimulator of our research, including that reported here.
