Abstract for Cristina Schmitt's talk

Competence and performance in child language: The case of determiner acquisition
Cristina Schmitt (Michigan State University)
February 8, 2007 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

The distinction between competence and performance has long been a central part of linguistic theorizing, since there are very clear cases of processing difficulties involving syntactically well-formed structures. In the domain of language acquisition, a common mode of explanation of child differences with respect to adults is to attribute to children an adult-like competence, but with some performance difficulties that account for the differences. However, it is also likely that children simply have different grammars than adults, and differences in behavior between them can be attributed to different competence grammars. In this talk I will present experimental data on the acquisition of determiners by young children which provides evidence for both sorts of explanation. I will argue that children's misuse of definite determiners and apparent miscomprehension of the scopal properties of some indefinite determiners is best attributed to differences in the way children calculate the domain restrictions of the determiner, while the fact that English children allow generic and inalienable possession interpretations of the definite is to be attributed to the fact that they have a slightly different representation of the definite than adults. This pattern presents interesting problems for subset approaches to learning and sheds light on what the adult grammar should look like.