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Cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of article choice shows that young monolingual typically developing (TD) children acquiring a two-article language system based on definiteness often use definite articles where adults would use an indefinite (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Maratsos, 1976; Schaeffer & Matthewson, 2005; van Hout, Harrigan, & de Villiers, 2010; Zehler & Brewer, 1982). This is illustrated in (1):
(1). Child: I dreamed about the giraffe last night.
(Adult: What giraffe?)
This has been attributed to the failure to consider the hearer's knowledge state as independent of the speaker's, or to take the hearer's perspective, which in turn may be related to an immature theory of mind (ToM).
Moreover, non-adultlike interpretation of the indefinite article a is also found in TD English-speaking children (van Hout et al., 2010), as exemplified in (2), which was presented with a picture of a teacher with a piece of cake, and several other pieces of cake on a table.
(2). Experimenter: "John sees his teacher with a piece of cake.
He asks her if he can have a piece of cake."
Target: a different piece (van Hout et al., 2010, p. 1985).
Van Hout et al.'s (2010) results show that in such a situation, children often choose the teacher's piece of cake. The overly liberal interpretation of the indefinite article (i.e., choosing the already mentioned referent for the indefinite) has been explained by the failure to draw so-called scalar implicatures, implicitly communicated inferences that go beyond the explicit meaning of an utterance, and that are therefore pragmatic in nature. Non-adultlike use of indefinites has also been found in production (English child language: Schafer & de Villiers, 2000; Dutch child language: Keydeniers, Eliazer, & Schaeffer, 2017), as illustrated in (3):
(3). Experimenter: Hey, who do you see in the picture? Child: Katrijn.
Experimenter: What else do you see? Child: A train!
Experimenter: And what did Katrijn just do?
Child: She pushed a train. (Schaeffer & Matthewson, 2005, replicated in Keydeniers et al., 2017. Translated from Dutch.)
Keydeniers et al. (2017) propose that, as in interpretation, children's substituting the definite article with an indefinite one may also be due to the underdeveloped pragmatic skill of drawing scalar implicatures.
Besides studies in...