Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2017
Edited by Sander Lestrade and Bert Le Bruyn
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 34] 2017
► pp. 93–109
Definite-indefinite article choice development in Dutch child language
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 23 November 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.34.07key
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.34.07key
Abstract
Many acquisition studies indicate that across languages, children overgenerate definite articles in indefinite contexts. However, proportions and ages at which children make this error vary, and so do theoretical accounts. Attempting to resolve some of the mixed results, we combined the methods of two different studies (Schaeffer, Jeannette C. & Lisa Matthewson. 2005. “Grammar and pragmatics in the acquisition of article systems.” Natural language and linguistic theory 231: 52–101. (SM) and van Hout, Angeliek, Kaitlyn Harrigan & Jill de Villiers. 2010. “Asymmetries in the acquisition of definite and indefinite NPs.” Lingua 1201: 1973–1990. (HHV)) and administered them to one group of 82 Dutch-acquiring children aged 2–9 and adult controls (N = 23). The results show that definite article overuse takes place in (a) only the youngest age group (2;1–3;7) in the relevant SM indefinite condition, (b) only the two oldest child groups (6;0–9;4) in the HHV indefinite condition, and (c) adults score at ceiling in the SM conditions, while only around 70% correct in the HHV conditions. We argue that (a) the indefinite conditions of the two article choice experiments test different types of knowledge, and therefore their results cannot be compared, (b) the HHV task has more methodological drawbacks than the SM task, rendering its results difficult to interpret, and (c) the results provide less evidence for HHV’s unranked-constraint hypothesis than for SM’s lack-of-Concept-of-Non-Shared-Assumptions hypothesis.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Concept of Non-Shared Assumptions (CNSA)
- 2.2Unranked constraints
- 3.Method
- 3.1Participants
- 3.2Article choice Sentence Elicitation Task adapted from S/SM
- 3.3Article choice NP Elicitation Task adapted from HHV and KHH
- 3.4Comparison conditions S/SM and HHV/KHH experiments
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Results Sentence Elicitation Task based on S/SM’s experiment
- 4.2Discussion Results Sentence Elicitation Task based on S/SM’s experiment
- 4.3Results NP Elicitation Task based on HHV/KHH’s experiment
- 4.4Discussion Results NP Elicitation Task based on HHV/KHH’s experiment
- 5.General discussion
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
References
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