(Under)estimating preschoolers’ knowledge in the acquisition of the

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.