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Published on: February 8, 2019
Information structure in language acquisition. Production and comprehension of (in)definite articles by
Julia Fuchs1, Ulrike Domahs2, Christina Kauschke2
1Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany.
Abstract:
The present study investigates the production and comprehension of indefinite and definite articles as markers of givenness by typically-developing German-speaking children, from the perspective of information structure theory. The study involves 93 typically-developing children aged four to seven years old with normal language-skills and 20 adults. The results of a story-narration task and a truth-value judgment task reveal that children have more problems with new than with given referents in production as well as comprehension suggesting a "given better than new"-pattern. These findings are explained in the context of perspective-taking capacities and cue weighting theory.
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