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CNL Lunch Talks
Alan Munn Thursday May 10th 2007, 12:30 PM, 1108B Marie Mount Hall Acquiring Definiteness Children's productions of definite determiners shows that they have the correct syntactic distribution quite early. However, it is less obvious that young children's comprehension of determiners is actually adult-like. There are also well known differences, tracing back to work of Karmiloff-Smith and Maratsos, in the production of definites in certain discourse contexts. When looking at mismatches between children's behaviour and adult behaviour, there are always two possible explanations: children have a different linguistic representation from the adults, or children have the same representation but different pragmatic rules. In this talk I'll discuss results from a number of experiments investigating definiteness comprehension in English, Spanish and Chinese and argue for both types of explanation of the results are needed, and that the nature of children's initial choices on the representation of the definite determiner may bear on the issue of what the adult representation should be. |