2018 Friday Poster 6677

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

Maximality before uniqueness: Children’s acquisition of definite descriptions in French
A. Ahmad

Goal: This investigation of children’s acquisition of definiteness in French shows that children perceive singular definite descriptions (SDD) very differently than plural definite descriptions (PDD). We propose that maximality (Wexler, 2003) is acquired before the uniqueness condition and is strongly linked to cardinality development. Previous research has not explored such comparisons.

Previous studies: Young children tend to use definite articles in situations where the referent is not unique or salient, and they often fail to interpret PDD maximally (Maratsos, 1976; Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Munn et al., 2006; Caponigro et al., 2012; Tieu et al., 2017). Wexler claims that this problem is due to a deficit in children’s language computational system. He proposes a unitary analysis for SDD and PDD by claiming that children lack the presupposition of uniqueness and maximality in their grammar. By treating maximality as an extension of uniqueness, definiteness is expected to be observed equally in PDD and SDD, or even more so in SDD.

Experiment: 57 children aged 3 to 5;6 y.o. and 25 adults from Quebec participated in our act-out task. We asked participants to pick/put certain balls from/in certain baskets of different colors. Participants needed to identify the right (number of) objects depending on the articles used in the instructions. Knowledge of definiteness was also examined through participants’ interpretation of SDD in inappropriate contexts (Example I). Actions, comments, and reaction times were recorded as evaluation measures. Control items containing some quantifiers, a demonstrative as well as the zero article were also included.

Results: The results show that

  • children gave the maximal interpretations to PDD between 14% and 69% of the time whereas adults did so 97% of the time;
  • children rejected the use of the definite article for non-unique referents in SDD between 13% and 38% of the time whereas adults did so 77% of the time;
  • children’s reaction times for inappropriate SDD were significantly shorter than they were for grammatical PDD, whereas adults’ results show the opposite (p<0.05);
  • even children with the highest scores in PDD (81%) scored poorly in SDD (27%);
  • children interpreted PDD differently in terms of number of Reaction times were significantly longer when PDD involved five or ten objects (p<0.05); and
  • scores of maximality in PDD increased with scores of plurality in

Conclusion: Children are oblivious of the uniqueness condition even by age 5;6. However, performance in maximality seems to improve with age and knowledge of cardinality. These observations suggest that while children have difficulties with definiteness, they generally score better in PDD than in SDD. Wexler’s (2003) joint analysis fails to explain these empirical  data.  We  claim  that  maximality  is  strongly  linked  to  the  development  of cardinality in children and is acquired in a stable order. Previous studies report that young children’s acquisition of cardinality occurs in different stages and continues until age 4 (Clark et al., 2009; Meyer et al., 2017). We propose that the delay in maximality acquisition is due to the lengthy process of acquiring cardinality.

References

Caponigro, Ivano; Pearl, Lisa; Brooks, Neon; and Barner, David. 2012. Acquiring the meaning of free relative clauses and plural definite descriptions. Journal of Semantics 29:261-293.

Clark, Eve V. and Nikitina, Tatiana V. 2009. One vs. more than one: Antecedents to plural marking in early language acquisition. Linguistics 47(1):103-139.

Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. 1979. A functional approach to child language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maratsos, Michael. 1976. The uses of definite and indefinite reference in young children: An experimental study of semantic acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Meyer, Caitlin; Barbiers, Sjef; and Weerman, Fred. 2017. Ordinals are not as easy as one, two, three: The acquisition of cardinals and ordinals in Dutch. Language Acquisition. DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2017.1391266.

Munn, Alan; Miller, Karen; and Schmitt, Christina. 2006. Maximality and plurality in children’s interpretation of definites. Dans D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia et C. Zaller (dir.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (p. 377-387). Somerville, MA : Cascadilla Press.

Tieu, Lyn; Kriz, Manuel; and Chemla, Emmanuel. 2017. Children’s acquisition of homogeneity in plural definite descriptions. Manuscript submitted for publication. Wexler, Ken. 2003. Maximal trouble. Paper presented at CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, Cambridge, MA.