Do Young Children Use Definite Expressions for Specific References?

Abstract

We are concerned in this chapter with the way in which factors in the physical situation influence children’s use of linguistic expressions. In particular, we are concerned with children’s use of definite references to refer to specific entities. We begin our discussion by describing the semantics of determiners to show how specificity is involved in their use. After that we review the evidence on children’s use of definite expressions and conclude that while children have a good grasp of the need to use definite expressions when an entity is familiar to the listener, the evidence is unclear as to whether they are aware of the need to use an identifying definite reference when referring to one of several familiar entities. We describe an experiment to investigate this issue which shows that young children do not have a good grasp of the notion of specificity: they describe salient features of the referent rather than identifying it in relation to the situation of which it is a part.