The present study investigates the production and comprehension of indefinite and definite articles as markers of givenness by typically-developing German-speaking children, from the perspective of information structure theory. The study involves 93 typically-developing children aged four to seven years old with normal language-skills and 20 adults. The results of a story-narration task and a truth-value judgment task reveal that children have more problems with new than with given referents in production as well as comprehension suggesting a “given better than new”-pattern. These findings are explained in the context of perspective-taking capacities and cue weighting theory.

中文翻译：

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语言习得中的信息结构。德语儿童对（不）定冠词的产生和理解

本研究从信息结构理论的角度调查了典型发展中的德语儿童对不定冠词和定冠词作为给予性标记的产生和理解。该研究涉及 93 名年龄在 4 至 7 岁、语言能力正常的发育正常的儿童和 20 名成年人。故事叙述任务和真值判断任务的结果表明，在生产过程中，儿童对新事物的问题比对给定参照物的问题更多，并且在理解上表明“给定优于新”模式。这些发现在观点采择能力和线索加权理论的背景下进行了解释。