Semantic and Pragmatic Language Development: Children Know ‘That’ Better

... “There were some boys and some girls, and suddenly one of them laughed out loud. Can you tell me who?” says the experimenter. “The girl!” retorts a 4-year-old child. This paper readdresses the issue of young English children’s misinterpretation and misuse of the definite determiner ‘the’ as ‘one of’, especially in such partitive contexts, where neither the speaker nor the listener know the identity of the referent and where an adult would use the indefinite article. Are children unaware of states of other’s minds and are Egocentric or do they not know what ‘the’, the most common word of English, means? Previously, the former was invoked as an explanation for children’s errors (Maratsos 1974, based on Piaget 1955), however given a recently proposed alternative, that children have problems with Uniqueness, a key component of the semantic definition of ‘the’ (Wexler 2005, based on Heim 1991), there are now two views that can be explicitly contrasted. The goal of this paper is to begin distinguishing the possible pragmatic and/or cognitive deficits on the children’s part, from the possible computational deficits of children’s as-yet-undeveloped linguistic semantic system.