The Use of Word Order and Determiners to Mark Information Status in Adult and Child Saudi Arabic

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the interaction between word order and determiners to mark information status in adult and child monolingual speakers of Saudi Arabic. It investigates how child and adult native speakers of Saudi Arabic mark new versus old information using word order and determiners in conjoined noun phrases. The methodology is elicited production of old and new information in conjoined noun phrases adapted from the three following studies, Narasimhan & Dimroth (2008), Chen & Narasimhan (2018), and De Ruiter et al. (2018). Three groups of participants were recruited for the elicitation, including 18 male and female monolingual native Arabic speaking adults, 4-year-old, and 6-year-old children. The results show that children differ significantly from adults in preferring the “new-before-old” word order and older children (6-year-olds) also differ significantly from younger children (4-year-olds) in producing fewer “old-before-new” word order. The results also show that the Arabic determiner was not frequently used to label old referents. Children and adults did not significantly use the Arabic determiner to mark new versus old information.