Are preschool children sensitive to the function of accessibility markers? A visual world study with German-speaking three- to four-year-olds

Little is known about when children understand the function of anaphoric referring expressions to signal different degrees of accessibility of discourse referents. This visual world study investigates German-speaking three- to four-year-olds' online processing and offline interpretation of repeated names and personal pronouns in a context where reference is made to highly accessible discourse referents. Repeated names are markers of low accessibility, whereas personal pronouns are preferentially used to refer to highly accessible referents. For online processing, results showed a significant effect of referring expression: children looked at the target picture more often after hearing a personal pronoun than after hearing repeated names. Offline results revealed no significant differences between the two conditions. We conclude that German-speaking preschool children are sensitive to the function of accessibility markers during online processing, and suggest that the difference between online and offline results may be due to the different task demands.