Jack and crew in Language Acquisition

On preschooler's knowledge of "the".

Congratulations to alum Jack Yuanfan Ying *25, along with his crew of Jeff, Alexander and Valentine, for "(Under)estimating preschoolers’ knowledge in the acquisition of the," which is now out in Language Acquisition. 

The article, abstracted below, reports experimental work Jack did towards his dissertation at UMD, engaging the view that children under 4 have trouble using definite descriptions. He presents a combination of corpus and behavioral studies suggesting that the bad press is exaggerated: even young children know what the means, and generally use it appropriately. 

Presently Jack is ​on a postdoc at the Laboratory for Language, Learning, and the Brain directed by Patrick Wong at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Elicited production studies have suggested that children up to age five sometimes misuse singular definite descriptions (the N) in contexts where the referent is not mutually known or uniquely identifiable in the domain of reference. These errors have been variously attributed to children’s developing ability to reason about the perspectives of others, an incorrect semantics for the, or pragmatic immaturity. To assess these claims, we first examine children’s spontaneous use of the—its frequency, communicative outcomes, and adult-likeness—then turn to a controlled elicited production task to diagnose whether children can succeed with the requirements of definiteness. We find that in natural speech, children use the at comparable rates to their mothers overall, with their distribution pattern across syntactic environments largely mirroring their mothers’ (Corpus Study 1), and with rare communication breakdowns (Corpus Study 2). We further find that 2- to 4-year-old children’s production of the and a are highly guessable, just like that of their caregivers, suggesting that children’s article choices show substantial similarities to adults’ (Experiment 1). Finally, in a new elicitation task, we find that most 3- to 4-year-olds succeed in producing definite descriptions; they only use the when the referent is mutually known or uniquely identifiable in the context, although some differences between child and adult usage remain (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that while preschoolers make errors sometimes, they are, by and large, sensitive to the conditions that license singular definite descriptions.