Chapter 10. Vietnamese children’s interpretation of definite noun phrases

Most work on the acquisition of definiteness examines languages with definite determiners and grammaticalised number, and finds slower acquisition of definiteness compared to number. We replicate an act-out task from Munn et al. (2006) testing comprehension of definites in Vietnamese – a language with neither of these characteristics. In contrast to the results from English and Spanish children, Vietnamese children are found to make few definiteness errors, instead struggling with number, casting doubt on a universal difficulty with definiteness. We argue that this difference stems from the way in which children integrate information from number and definiteness. Given a high level of task difficulty, children acquiring languages with definite determiners and grammatical number, such as English and Spanish, sacrifice definiteness in favour of number, while those acquiring Vietnamese prioritise definiteness, resulting in number errors.

• Affiliations: 1: Michigan State University, USA