Info for readers
Info for authors
Info for editors
Info for libraries
Order form
Shopping cart
Angeliek van Hout, Kaitlyn Harrigan, and Jill de Villiers
76-87 (complete pdf)
It is well known that children incorrectly produce definite NPs instead of indefinite NPs when referring to new referents in a discourse. The explanations for the overuse of the have postulated cognitive, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic problems (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Maratsos, 1974; Schaeffer and Matthewson, 2005; Schafer and de Villiers, 2000; Wexler, 2003). Van Hout, Harrigan and De Villiers compared production and comprehension of English definite and indefinite NPs. In the comprehension task the preschoolers over-allowed the to refer to a new referent, which mirrored their over-use of the for new referents in the production task. The authors interpret these findings as a failure to simultaneously take speaker and hearer perspectives into account. Instead, for children the visual context suffices to establish the anaphoric reference of definites.
Published in:
Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA 2008)
edited by Jean Crawford, Koichi Otaki, and Masahiko Takahashi
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-436-2 library binding
v+346 pages
publication date: 2009
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA