Joint attention helps explain why children omit new referents

New referents are typically introduced into adult discourse with lexical nouns. This makes new referents maximally clear for listeners, and helps the listeners direct their attention appropriately. A different trend is observed in child language, where new referents may be realised with demonstratives or pronouns, or they may be omitted altogether. This has led some to claim that children are pragmatically immature and not sensitive to the perspective of their interlocutors. In this paper, we analyse a videotaped corpus of naturalistic spontaneous speech of four children acquiring Inuktitut (2;0–3;6) to examine the different ways in which they realise new referents. Our results show that in their realisation of new referents children are sensitive to the presence or absence of joint attention. Specifically, they tend to omit arguments when joint attention is present, and they use lexical forms when it is absent. Their use of demonstratives reflects similar sensitivity: they tend to use demonstrative clitics when joint attention is present but independent demonstrative forms when it is absent. The use of omitted forms in child language is thus not explained by any pragmatic deficiency; indeed, it shows that children adjust their messages for the interlocutor, strictly following the Gricean Maxim of Quantity.