In this paper we discuss the acquisition of the voicing system of Malagasy, an Austronesian language. Our study is based on the longitudinal data of 3 children ages 19 to 32 months, and is to our knowledge the first systematic investigation of the acquisition of Malagasy. The Malagasy voicing system has a distinctive morphology and involves the promotion of an argument (actor, theme, instrument, etc.) to a referentially and syntactically prominent position, typically clause-final. We look at two competing accounts of the Malagasy voicing system, one in which the promoted argument is analyzed as a subject and the promotion operation an instance of A-movement (Guilfoyle, Hung & Travis 1992) and a more recent account in which Malagasy is analyzed as a V2-like language in which the promoted argument is a topic and the promotion an instance of A'-movement (Pearson 2001(Pearson , 2005. Both these analyses have clear implications for acquisition, which we examine in this paper. Our acquisition results favor the analysis of the promoted argument as an A'-element. We also show that there is a developmental stage in Malagasy that parallels the root infinitive (RI) stage widely observed in various European languages. Apparent differences between the Germanic RIs and the analogous phenomenon in Malagasy are derived from differences in the functional structure associated with a voicing system as opposed to an agreement system. Malagasy Acquisition.3

This study calculates developmental indices of language growth in Emirati Arabic based on a two-year longitudinal corpus collected from six Emirati children.1 The target indices include Mean Length of Utterance in morphemes and words (MLUm and MLUw), utterance-per-turn counts (UoT), type-token-ratio (TTR) and an index of vocabulary diversity (D). Spearman correlation tests show significant correlations between MLUm, MLUw and age. A slightly weaker correlation is found between age and D, while no correlation is found with TTR. Finally, a strong correlation is found between age and UoT. The results provide an important new data point in the body of knowledge about language growth, and show that language acquisition displays similar developmental patterns for linear morphological processes across languages.

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