A little more of that, a bit less of this: A probe into demonstrative use in Hungarian child language

This paper reports on the results of a pioneering pilot production study and a corpus study aimed at exploring demonstrative use in child Hungarian. Production data from an elicitation task have revealed that children use proportionally more distal demonstrative items than members of the adult control group. We have found a similar difference between child language and child-directed adult language data in an independent corpus study that we have conducted. The experimental results indicate that the demonstrative use of 4-year-old children is divergent: adopting the terminology introduced by Clark and Sengul (1978), some children are at the NO CONTRAST stage, others show signs of being at the transitional, PARTIAL CONTRAST stage, and 6 children out of 13 participants have already developed adult-like patterns, they are at the FULL CONTRAST stage