ABSTRACT
In the mid-sixties, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Dan Slobin, and several of their colleagues in Psychology, Anthropology, and Linguistics at the Institute for Human Learning in Berkeley produced a Field Manual for the Cross-cultural Study of the Acquisition of Communicative Competence (Slobin, 1967). As stated by Ervin-Tripp in the introduction, the goal of that manual was to provide a set of guidelines for examining both "children's acquisition of linguistic codes and the social rules for the use of such codes." At a time when the focus of developmental psycholinguistics was almost exclusively on discovering universals in the acquisition of grammar (based largely on studies of English), the authors of the manual argued for both (a) the need to expand the notion of competence to include communicative as well as grammatical competence, and (b) the importance of looking at cross-cultural variation.
