The incremental effect of discourse-pragmatic sensitivity on referential choice in the acquisition of a first language

• Speakers’ sensitivity to incremental effects of discourse accessibility is tested.
• Caregivers and children realize accessible subjects mostly as null or pronouns.
• Caregivers and children realize inaccessible subjects mostly as lexical forms.
• Use of lexical forms increases incrementally as referents are more inaccessible.
• Children's referential choice becomes increasingly adult-like from age 2 to 3.

Previous research has demonstrated that children as young as 2;0 are sensitive to discourse-pragmatic context when selecting referring expressions. If a referent is present in the discourse context and/or jointly attended to by the listener, a child will be more likely to omit a referring expression or use a pronominal form. To date, most research has examined the effect of individual features in the discourse, whereas in reality the various features occur and work together. In this study, we explore children's sensitivity to the incremental effect of six discourse-pragmatic features. This stepwise approach is a more nuanced approach to measure the cumulative effect of accessibility on argument realization in order to reveal the predictive patterns of accessibility. Videotaped data from four monolingual English-speaking children in spontaneous interaction with their caregivers are analyzed at two ages: 2;0–2;7 and 3;0–3;1. Caregivers and children at both ages are sensitive to incremental effects of accessibility. Their selection of linguistic forms follows a cline such that low information forms are utilized for accessible referents. As referents become increasingly inaccessible, they are more likely to be realized as high information forms. These results indicate another important dimension of children's sensitivity to discourse-pragmatics and have implications for assumptions about children's theory of mind.