De Cat, C. (2009) Experimental Evidence for Preschoolers' Mastery of "Topic". Language Acquisition, 16 (4). pp. 224-239. ISSN 1532-7817
Abstract
This study investigates the acquisition of the discourse/pragmatic notion of topic, based on an experimental task eliciting topic vs. focus subjects. In spoken French, these are obligatorily realized as dislocated vs. nondislocated noun phrases. The results provide overwhelming evidence for the early mastery of topic, even by the youngest children (2;6). The only difficulty was in the evaluation of fine-grained salience distinctions, leading to the underuse of full noun phrases in ambiguous contexts. A theory of mind test revealed that the ability to assess their listener’s knowledge state is not sufficient to explain this underuse. Instead, children’s overreliance on the situational context as a source of complementary information to disambiguate their utterances is argued to have a major impact on how explicit they are.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Keywords: | information structure, discourse, topic, focus, French, first language acquisition |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Languages Cultures & Societies (Leeds) > Linguistics & Phonetics (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number AHRC D001099/1 |
Depositing User: | Dr Cecile De Cat |
Date Deposited: | 12 Apr 2010 13:26 |
Last Modified: | 08 Nov 2016 18:24 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10489220903190612 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/10489220903190612 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:10746 |