The Development of Referring Expression Use from Age 4 to 7 in Swedish-Speaking Children

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters usingappropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse.We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children’s discoursemodels are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding,such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors such as givennesswill start to play a larger role. To test this, we conducted a longitudinal studyof referring expression use in elicited narratives. Swedish-speaking children(n = 17) were tested three times between age 4 and 7 and compared toadults (n = 20). The results show that children, like adults, take into account if,when and how a character has been mentioned earlier when referring, butthat they rely more on animacy than adults. These results indicate that thevarious cues for referential choices are in place in preschool children’s discoursemodels, but are weighted differently than in adults