| Chapter 2: | Background Study |
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studies approach the magnitude of those found among the three children in Brown’s longitudinal study” (p. 272). de Villiers and de Villiers suggested that the order of acquisition might be best predicted by some combination of syntactic and semantic complexity, frequency of these forms in the parents’ speech, and perceptibility in the speech.
Generally speaking, children seem to have fully mastered the use of the article system by the age of nine (Warden, 1976). Yet the period between two and three years appears to be the most crucial for article acquisition since this is the time period when children start acquiring articles, as shown in Leopold’s studies. Moreover, children appear to have differentiated the dimension of specific versus non-specific reference with some precision around age of three. As Brown (1973) observed, “children somewhere between the ages of 32 and 41 months, roughly three years, do control the specific/non-specific distinction as coded by the articles” (p. 355). During this period, it has been observed that children often tend to overuse the definite article the. To find a way to explain this phenomenon, Maratsos (1976) conducted the first major experimental study of child acquisition of the articles and investigated the use and understanding of the articles by three- and four-year-old children through a story-telling task and a set of tasks consisting of various games. He found that both the three- and the four-year-old children could make the contrast between the as specific and a as non-specific in certain specified contextual features. When the object in question was specific to the child (speaker) but not to the listener, however, the three-year-old children substituted the definite article for the indefinite article. Maratsos concluded that the younger children could understand and apply the basic rules for article usage, but their usage was for the most part egocentric (Piaget, 1926) in that they did not consider the listener’s lack of knowledge about something they already knew.
Walden (1976) came to the same conclusion drawn by Maratsos. He studied children of three to nine years old, as well as adults, and compared the usage of the indefinite article with that of the definite article. He found that both adults and children used the indefinite article correctly for