The marking of new information in children's narratives: A comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese

This study examines children's uses of nominal determiners ('local markings') and utterance structure ('global markings') to introduce new referents. Two narratives were elicited from preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults in English (N = 80), French (N = 40), German (N = 40), and Chinese (N = 40) Given typological differences (e.g. richness of morphology), these languages rely differentially on local vs. global devices to mark newness: postverbal position is obligatory in Chinese (determiners optional), indefinite determiners in the other languages (position optional). Three findings recur across languages: obligatory newness markings emerge late (seven-year-olds); local markings emerge first, including Chinese optional ones; local and global markings are strongly related. Crosslinguistic differences also occur: English-speaking preschoolers use local markings least frequently; until adult age global markings are rare in English, not contrastive in German and not as frequent in Chinese as in French, despite obligatoriness. It is concluded that three factors determine acquisition: (1) universal discourse factors governing information flow; (2) cognitive factors resulting from the greater functional complexity of global markings; (3) language-specific factors related to how different systems map both grammatical and discourse functions onto forms.