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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Developmental Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1403528

Children's Understanding of Demonstratives: an Experimental Study with German-Speaking Children between Five and Seven Years of Age

Provisionally accepted
Ramiro D. Glauer Ramiro D. Glauer 1*Elena Sixtus Elena Sixtus 2Gregor Kachel Gregor Kachel 3Jan Lonnemann Jan Lonnemann 2Frauke Hildebrandt Frauke Hildebrandt 1
  • 1 Fachhochschule Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
  • 2 University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany
  • 3 Leipzig University, Leipzig, Lower Saxony, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Demonstratives ("This"/"that") express a speaker-relative distance contrast and need to be substituted for each other systematically: depending on their relative position, what one speaker refers to by saying "this" another speaker has to refer to by saying "that". This substitution aspect of demonstratives poses additional difficulties for learning demonstratives because it requires recognizing that two speakers have to refer to the same thing with different words, and this might be one reason for the reportedly protracted acquisition of demonstratives. In an online study conducted in German, it was investigated whether children in the estimated upper age range of demonstrative acquisition (5 to 7 years) understand demonstratives' substitution aspect with familiar ("dies"/"das") and novel ("schmi"/"schmu") demonstratives, and whether they understand novel words ("schmi"/"schmu") when used non-demonstratively as labels (N = 73; between-subject). Children's accuracy was compared with adult performance (N = 74). The study shows that children between 5 and 7 years of age perform less accurately than adults in all conditions. While adults' performance was highly accurate in all conditions (between 75% and 92% correct), children performed below chance in both demonstrative conditions and above chance in the labelling condition. This suggests that children do not understand demonstratives in the presented setup. More detailed analyses of children's response patterns indicate that they instead treat words as mutually exclusive labels in any condition.

    Keywords: Demonstratives, language acquisition, Deictic reference, pragmatic development, perspective taking

    Received: 19 Mar 2024; Accepted: 22 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Glauer, Sixtus, Kachel, Lonnemann and Hildebrandt. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ramiro D. Glauer, Fachhochschule Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

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