Are there any fundamental differences in personal pronoun acquisition across languages?

Question

I am interest in reversal errors in personal pronoun acquisition. My knowledge comes mostly from studies done with English-speaking children, and I was wondering if there is any languages where this effect would not occur or occurs in a fundamentally different way.

Background: Reversal errors

The referent of pronouns shifts with conversation roles. For pronouns a child must realize that she needs to reverse the pronouns in order to communicate correctly. A father will refer to his daughter as you and himself as me, but the daughter must infer that when she speaks to her father, he becomes you and she becomes me. If a child imitates what she hears, she will refer to herself as you and to everyone else as me - a reversal error.

Answer 1

Perhaps not.

For as surprising as it sounds, even children learning sign language as their first language go through this same process despite the fact that many if not all sign languages use some kind of pointing for at least first and second person pronouns.

They first learn the abstract symbol for the pronoun ignoring the spatial indication and will point to themselves to indicate "you"! Later they make the same change hearing children make and switch to pointing to the person addressed to mean "you".

Here are some articles I could find on the Internet:

• From Gesture to Symbol: The Relation Between Form and Meaning in the Acquisition of Personal Pronouns in American Sign Language.
• Petitto, L. A. (1987). On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition of personal pronouns in American Sign Language.

Answer 2

I think Japanese (and maybe some other languages) might be special in this case. Japanese uses personal pronouns much less than e.g. English, and second person pronouns are in many cases completely avoided.

When speaking to kids, parents will usually refer to themselves as ママ mama／パパ papa or お母さん okāsan／お父さん otōsan, i.e. Mommy/Daddy or Mother/Father. When referring to the child, they will say child's name+君 kun/ちゃん chan (honorific suffixes), or sometimes a nickname which might or might not have the honorific suffix "built in". Personal pronouns are hardly ever used.

Because of this, the reversal errors do not occur in their usual form. However, different but related problems occur:

1. The child has to learn to remove the honorific suffix when referring to themselves.
2. Even without the honorific suffix, referring yourself by name is considered childish. Children have to learn to use a first person pronoun when referring to themselves.

Answer 3

It's notable that the inclusive "we" is symmetric, and a that an inclusive sense of "I" and "you" is not completely unthinkable (that is, one can differentiate that the appelative sense of an assertive "I am hungry" is inclusive, and that "we will go now" is nevertheless egoistic; nevermind "feed me", which I'd deem an absurdity for a young child to say :D).

I'm kind of answering to the sign-language related answers. Nevertheless, if reading the question's word "language" as "logic system" (synonymously called "theory" in maths circles), then I might even post this as an answer, deeming an inclusive logic a sub-language. It's not surprising that single valued logic develops before a two valued logic.

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Note that me, mi etc means "we" in some languages. Also compare Ger "man", French "on", Eng "one" for an indefinite pronoun, and Proto-Indo-European *sem- "one; together", *se- or *sel- "self, sole".