Abstract:
This study investigates the acquisition of the discourse/pragmatic
notion of topic, based on an experimental task eliciting topic vs. focus
subjects. In spoken French, these are obligatorily realized as
dislocated vs. nondislocated noun phrases. The results provide
overwhelming evidence for the early mastery of topic, even by the
youngest children (2;6). The only difficulty was in the evaluation of
fine-grained salience distinctions, leading to the underuse of full noun
phrases in ambiguous contexts. A theory of mind test revealed that the
ability to assess their listener's knowledge state is not sufficient to
explain this underuse. Instead, children's overreliance on the
situational context as a source of complementary information to
disambiguate their utterances is argued to have a major impact on how
explicit they are.
Published in Language Acquisition 16:224-239. (doi:10.1080/10489220903190612)