Towards an Experimental Paradigm for Testing Knowledge of Definiteness.

This paper discusses the surprisingly complex process of designing an experimental procedure to test Hebrew-speaking adults' knowledge of definiteness. Initial attempts to obtain implicit judgments of the appropriateness of the use of the determiners in "given" unique and "non-given" non-unique contexts failed to render distinctive judgments of definite versus indefinite NPs. This was true for a variety of procedures, including two versions of object selection and an act-out task. The predicted distinction was successful achieved exclusively by instructing participants to provide explicit judgments of the appropriateness of the use of the (in) definite determiner.