TY - JOUR
T1 - The Development of Referring Expression Use from Age 4 to 7 in Swedish-Speaking Children
AU - Vogels, Jorrig
AU - Lindgren, Josefin
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under Grant 275-89-0360 to the first author. We thank the children and their parents, as well as the adult participants, for taking part in this study. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their thorough reading and helpful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children’s discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors such as givenness will start to play a larger role. To test this, we conducted a longitudinal study of referring expression use in elicited narratives. Swedish-speaking children (n = 17) were tested three times between age 4 and 7 and compared to adults (n = 20). The results show that children, like adults, take into account if, when and how a character has been mentioned earlier when referring, but that they rely more on animacy than adults. These results indicate that the various cues for referential choices are in place in preschool children’s discourse models, but are weighted differently than in adults.
AB - When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children’s discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors such as givenness will start to play a larger role. To test this, we conducted a longitudinal study of referring expression use in elicited narratives. Swedish-speaking children (n = 17) were tested three times between age 4 and 7 and compared to adults (n = 20). The results show that children, like adults, take into account if, when and how a character has been mentioned earlier when referring, but that they rely more on animacy than adults. These results indicate that the various cues for referential choices are in place in preschool children’s discourse models, but are weighted differently than in adults.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85141164963
U2 - 10.1080/0163853X.2022.2132794
DO - 10.1080/0163853X.2022.2132794
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85141164963
SN - 0163-853X
VL - 59
SP - 722
EP - 744
JO - Discourse Processes
JF - Discourse Processes
IS - 9
ER -