Reference & Cognition

Preschooler's Production of "The"

Preschoolers: Adult-like use of "the"

Corpus analysis: children (1;0-3;11) use "the" at rates comparable to their mothers overall and across contexts, with minimal referential failure (Ying et al., 2024).
Human simulation paradigm: adults presented with conversation snippets are equally well at guessing determiners ("the" vs. "a") used by children (2;0-5;0) and mothers (Ying et al., 2024).
Conversational elicited production: even 3- to 4-year-olds are adult-like in producing "the"-expressions (Ying et al., under review)

Figure 1. Production scenario for eliciting referring expressions

What makes learning "the" easy for toddlers

Video corpus (in prep): What are the usage profiles like for toddlers’ first vs. later uses of “the”? Do their earliest output simply mimic or differ from their caregivers' input?

Figure 2. Caregiver use longer referential chains with "the" than with "a"

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