| Summary: | The present study is a microanalytic analysis of the communicative interaction between Inuit caregivers and their children at 16 and 20 months of age. The caregivers in the study included an older more traditional mother, a younger less traditional mother, and a teenage sibling caregiver. Videotaped samples of naturalistic interaction between the Inuit caregivers and children were coded for communicative intent using the Inventory of Communicative Acts-Abridged (Ninio, Wheeler, Snow, Pan, & Rollins, 1991). Preliminary comparisons between the Inuit data and the results of studies of white middle-class caregiver-child interaction were also assessed. Results of the study demonstrate that there are differences in caregiver-child interaction within the Inuit culture and between the Inuit and the white-middle class culture. The implications of these findings for interactionist theories of language acquisition such as Bruner's Language Acquisition Support System (1981, 1985) are discussed.
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