Turn-taking is a hallmark of human conversation, yet its developmental trajectory remains poorly understood. Adults typically respond within a few hundred milliseconds, suggesting reliance on predictive cues rather than simply waiting for silence. In contrast, children’s longer gaps raise the question of whether they depend on simpler, reactive strategies. This study provides the first large-scale test of competing hypotheses about children’s turn-taking, using corpora of child–adult and adult–adult dialogues. In Study 1, we compared a simple silence-based threshold model with the Voice Activity Projection (VAP) model, which predicts upcoming speech activity from acoustic features. Results showed that silence alone could not account for children’s behavior, whereas predictive acoustic models performed well, indicating that even early turn-taking relies on anticipatory mechanisms. In Study 2, we asked what cues support these predictions by comparing models based on acoustic features alone with models combining acoustic and lexical information. For adult conversations, lexical cues improved prediction, but for child–adult dialogues, acoustic information was sufficient to solve the task. Together, these findings suggest that children’s turn-taking is predictive but primarily grounded in acoustic patterns, revealing both continuity with adult mechanisms and developmental differences in how linguistic cues are integrated.