The effect of individual discourse-pragmatic features on referential choice in child English

• We investigate how English-speaking children attend to six accessibility features.
• Children at 2;0 are sensitive to discourse accessibility when producing referents.
• Children are sensitive to accessibility features separately and in combination.
• PRIOR MENTION, PHYSICAL PRESENCE, and JOINT ATTENTION are the most salient.
• The children's sensitivity to accessibility becomes more adult-like by age 3;0.

Previous research has shown that children attend to discourse-pragmatics (e.g. newness, joint attention) when they produce referential forms in both languages that permit subject omission and those that do not. However, studies in languages that do not permit subject omission have been limited to only one or two discourse-pragmatic features, bilingual participants, and/or data taken from transcripts rather than videotapes. In the present study, we extend this work by investigating how English-speaking children attend to six discourse-pragmatic features, using videotaped data so that context for all features can be accurately assessed. We find that children as young as 2;0 are sensitive to these discourse-pragmatic features in selecting each of four referential forms: omitted subject, pronominal, demonstrative, and lexical noun phrase. PRIOR MENTION, PHYSICAL PRESENCE, and JOINT ATTENTION emerge as the most salient individual features, and children are sensitive to the features in combination.