Explaining children’s over-use of definites in partitive contexts

Partitive contexts are those in which a set of similar individuals has been introduced, and the speaker needs to refer to one of them. If that referent has not yet been individualized in the context, the only adult-like option is to refer to it with an indefinite. But in such contexts, children have been shown to often produce (illicit) definites. In comprehension, if children are made to identify a referent in a partitive context, they do not always interpret correctly the definiteness clues in the input, and tend to interpret definites as if they were indefinite. This article reviews production and comprehension studies in light of new experimental data, and argues that children’s errors in this type of context are due to processing limitations.