Children’s comprehension of pronouns and definites

Abstract

We present an experiment which tests children’s comprehension of the requirementsof use of pronouns and definites. An adult-like use of definites and pronouns imposes differentbut related requirements. In the case of definites, a unique referent is required in the context,whereas in the case of a pronoun, the referent in the context has to be salient. In this experiment,we use a novel word task to test three-year-olds’ sensitivity to these requirements. Ourresults show that children are adult-like in their sensitivity to salience in their comprehensionof pronouns, compared to definites. However, they failed to show sensitivity to the uniquenessrequirement on the use of definites.Keywords: pronouns, definiteness, language acquisition, salience, uniqueness, familiarity.

Finding the force: How children discern possibility and necessity modals

“…Last, children's struggles with necessity modals might not reflect a lack of knowledge of their underlying force, but rather difficulty deploying this knowledge in the right situations. Children may have trouble tracking what information is shared among interlocutors and thus grasping the intended domain of quantification (as has been argued for definite descriptions, where children seem to be overly permissive in using and accepting definites in contexts in which their uniqueness presupposition is not satisfied; Karmiloff-Smith 1979;Schaeffer and Matthewson 2005;Brockmann et al 2018).…”