Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T05:01:14.490Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Information tracking and encoding in early L1: linguistic competence vs. cognitive limitations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2011

CÉCILE DE CAT
CÉCILE DE CAT*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
*
Address for correspondence: Dr Cecile De Cat, Department of Linguistics & Phonetics, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study provides experimental evidence for preschool children's competence in basic information structure, with particular attention to the notions of topic and focus. It investigates their mastery of structural and definiteness distinctions to encode the information status of discourse referents, and seeks to distinguish linguistic competence from cognitive development as the source for children's ‘errors’. Evidence comes from a story-telling experiment performed on 45 children acquiring French (between the ages of 2 ; 6·22 and 5 ; 6·15). The article demonstrates continuity between the child and adult systems of basic discourse representation. It further argues that children's definiteness errors are not due to a lack of knowledge of the adult rules of information encoding. Rather, such errors stem from cognitive limitations and from assuming a wider common ground than adults would.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , September 2011 , pp. 828 - 860
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by an AHRC grant (D001099/1), which is gratefully acknowledged. I would like to thank the children who participated as well as their parents and the teachers of the E-J School (Nivelles, Belgium) for their collaboration and their interest. Thanks to Cécile Brich for the transcriptions.

References

REFERENCES

Allen, S. (2000). A discourse-pragmatic explanation for argument representation in Inuktitut. Linguistics 38(3), 483–521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, S. (2007). Interacting pragmatic influences on children's argument realisation. In Bowerman, M. & Brown, P. (eds), Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability, 191–210. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Anderson, A. & Boyle, E. (1994). Forms of introduction in dialogues. Their discourse contexts and communicative consequences. Language and Cognitive Processes 9, 101–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Apperly, I., Riggs, K., Simpson, A., Chiavarino, C. & Samson, D. (2006). Is belief reasoning automatic? Psychological Science 17(10), 841–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Avrutin, S. & Coopmans, P. (2000). Children who build bridges. In Howell, S. C., Fish, S. A. & Keith-Lucas, T. (eds), Proceedings of BUCLD 24, 80–91. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Baker, N. & Greenfield, P. (1988). The development of new and old information in young children's early language. Language Sciences 10(1), 3–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Costa, J. & Szendröi, K. (2006). Acquisition of focus marking in European Portuguese: Evidence for a unified approach to focus. In Torrens, V. and Escobar, L. (eds), The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages, 319–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Côté, M.-H. (1999). Issues in the analysis and acquisition of clitics in (spoken) French. Unpublished ms., MIT.Google Scholar
Culicover, P. & Jackendoff, R. (2005). Simpler syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cat, C. (2003). Syntactic manifestations of very early pragmatic competence. In Beach-ley, B., Brown, A. & Conlin, F. (eds), Proceedings of BUCLD 27, 209–219. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
De Cat, C. (2004a). Apparent non-nominative subjects in L1 French. In Paradis, J. & Prévost, P. (eds), The acquisition of French in different contexts: Focus on functional categories (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 32), 60–115. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
De Cat, C. (2004b). On the impact of French subject clitics on the information structure of the sentence. In Bok-Bennema, R., Hollebrandse, B., Kampers-Manhe, B. & Sleeman, P. (eds), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2002, 33–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cat, C. (2007). French dislocation: Interpretation, syntax, acquisition (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 17). Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cat, C. (2009). Experimental evidence for preschoolers' mastery of ‘topic’. Language Acquisition 16, 224–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cat, C. (forthcoming). Egocentric definiteness errors and perspective evaluation in preschool children. Unpublished ms., University of Leeds.Google Scholar
De Cat, C. & Tsoulas, G. (2006). The structure of fragments in (child) French. In Belleti, A., Bennati, E., Chesi, C., Domenico, E. D. & Ferrari, I. (eds), Language acquisition and development. Proceedings of GALA 2005, 142–47. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholar Press.Google Scholar
Diesing, M. (1989). Bare plural subjects, inflection, and the mapping to LF. In Bach, E., Kratzer, A. & Partee, B. (eds), Papers on quantification. Amherst, MA: NSF Report. Department of Linguistics, University of Massachussets.Google Scholar
E. Kiss, K. (1995). Introduction. In Kiss, K. E. (ed.), Discourse configurational languages, 3–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Emslie, H. & Stevenson, R. (1981). Pre-school children's use of the articles in definite and indefinite referring expressions. Journal of Child Language 8(2), 313–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Epley, N., Morewedge, C. & Keysar, B. (2004). Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 40, 760–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, N. (1997). The dynamics of focus structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, N. (2007). Information structure. The syntax-discourse interface (Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology). Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenfield, P. M. & Smith, J. H. (1976). The structure of communication in early language development (The child psychology series). New York; London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Heim, I. (1982). The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Massachussets.Google Scholar
Hickmann, M. (2003). Children's discourse: Person, space and time across languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hickmann, M., Hendriks, H., Roland, F. & Liang, J. (1996). The marking of new information in children's narratives: A comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language 23, 591–619.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language. A study of determiners and reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Krämer, I. (2003). Reference of indefinite and pronominal noun phrases in a story context: English children's comprehension. In Barbara, Beachley, Amanda, Brown & Frances, Conlin (eds), Proceedings of BUCLD27, 449–60. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Kramer, I. (2005). Egocentrism, deixis or conflict of domains? Lack of anaphoricity in child language. Talk presented at the workshop ‘Language Acquisition Between Sentence and Discourse’, May 2005, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form. Topic, focus, and the mental representation of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. (1974). Preschool children's use of definite and indefinite articles. Child Development 45, 446–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merchant, J. (2004). Fragments and ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy 6, 661–738.Google Scholar
Pickering, M. J. & Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27, 169–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Power, R. and Dal Martello, F. (1986). The use of the definite and indefinite articles by Italian preschool children. Journal of Child Language 13, 145–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Prince, E. F. (1981). Topicalisation, focus-movement, and Yiddish-movement: A pragmatic differentiation. In Alford, D., Hunold, K.-A., Macaulay, M., Walter, J., Brugman, C., Chertok, P., Civkulis, I. & Tobey, M. (eds), Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 249–64. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Reinhart, T. (1981). Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica 27, 53–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaeffer, J. (2000). The acquisition of direct object scrambling and clitic placement: Syntax and pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaeffer, J. & Matthewson, L. (2005). Grammar and pragmatics in the acquisition of article systems. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 23, 53–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schafer, R. & de Villiers, J. (2000). Imagining articles: What a and the can tell us about the emergence of DP. In Howell, S. C., Fish, S. & Keith-Lucas, T. (eds), Proceedings of BUCLD 24, 609–620. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Serratrice, L. (2006). The role of perceptual and discourse cues in the choice of referential expressions in English pre-schoolers and school-age children. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics & Phonetics 11, 173–82.Google Scholar
Serratrice, L. (2008). Discussion of the symposium on the effect of discourse and pragmatics on referential expression. Paper presented at the IASCL conference, Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A. & Paoli, S. (2004). Transfer at the syntax-pragmatics interface: Subjects and objects in Italian–English bilingual and monolingual acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 7, 183–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Song, H.-J. & Fisher, C. (2005). Who's ‘she’? Discourse prominence influences preschoolers' comprehension of pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language 52, 29–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A. & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research 22(3), 339–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warden, D. (1976). The influence of context on children's use of identifying expressions and references. British Journal of Psychology 67, 101–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zehler, A. M. & Brewer, W. F. (1982). Sequence and principles in article system use: An examination of a, the, and null acquisition. Child Development 53, 1268–74.Google Scholar