[2] The taxonomy was built on the theoretical writings of Speech Act theorists such as John Searle and sociologists such as Erving Goffman, as well as on mothers' descriptions of videotaped interaction sessions in which they had participated.
[19] An abridged version of it (Inventory of Communicative Acts-Abridged, INCA-A),[3] was prepared by Ninio for use by Catherine Snow, Barbara Pan, and colleagues at Harvard University in the research project “Foundations for Language Assessment in Spontaneous Speech” funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Both versions of the Ninio and Wheeler system are widely used in projects on English as well as Hebrew, Dutch, German, Irish, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and others.
Unexpectedly for an empiricist who emphasizes learning and the interactive context of acquisition, Ninio uses as her linguistic framework Chomsky's Minimalist Program alongside the formally analogous Dependency Grammar.
The appeal to the binary combining operation Merge (or Dependency) and the use of grammatical relations as atomic units of analysis makes her work on syntactic development unusual in the field where many researchers prefer such holistic approaches as Construction Grammar, or else forsake linguistically oriented analyses in favor of statistical patterns to be found by automatic means.
In this theoretical model, children are likened to new users of the World-Wide Web who both use the WWW and also create it with their own productions[4] The pragmatic uses of speech for communication among speakers are thus viewed not only as the background and context of acquisition but also as building blocks of connectivity in the complex system which is language.