This paper argues for the central role of language practices in children's construction of personhood. It aims to connect prior theorizing that recognized language as central to developmental issues, with more recent discussions about personhood stemming from discursive psychology and linguistic anthropology. Drawing upon longitudinal observations of caregivers and their preschoolers from three language communities, a case is made that the developmental process is more complex than current theorizing suggests. Although caregivers' discourse provides children with a powerful resource for person construction, children's systems do not immediately match those used by their caregivers and undergo significant developments over time.
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