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The Acquisition of Reference
Edited by Ludovica Serratrice and Shanley E.M. Allen
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 15] 2015
► pp. 25–49

The acquisition of nominal determiners

Evidence from cross-linguistic approaches

The acquisition of nominal determiners, in particular articles, has inspired a vast amount of research in different theoretical frameworks. Focusing on cross-linguistic approaches, this overview addresses two main issues: the emergence of determiners in children’s early speech, and the later development of the determiner system. The first issue accounts for when and how children acquire the ability to use determiners in the contexts required by the target language and how linguistic and environmental factors influence this process. The second issue deals with when and how children learn to use the full range of different determiner types in their correct morphological realization and in the appropriate discourse functions in spontaneous or narrative speech.
Keywords: animacy, articles, bare nouns, definiteness, fillers, prosodic licensing hypothesis
Published online: 25 November 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.15.02bas
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