Voluntary motion events in Uyghur child language

Abstract A key question in child language research is the relative impact of language-universal and language-specific factors during acquisition, and a prolific domain in addressing it has been the expression of motion events. This study examines motion event descriptions by 96 children and 24 adult speakers of Uyghur, an understudied Turkic language. The data were analysed for lexicalisation pattern, semantic density and syntactic packaging. Findings suggest that Uyghur children’s acquisition of motion expressions is shaped by both language-universal (e.g. difficulty with expressing events involving boundary crossing) and language-specific factors (e.g. early sensitivity to adult lexicalisation pattern, use of typologically congruent syntactic packaging strategies). Interestingly, while children reached adult levels for measures of lexicalisation pattern and syntactic packaging, they fell short in terms of semantic density. We propose that these measures may tap into different aspects of linguistic knowledge, which may be on different developmental timelines.