Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a 'Pronoun Interpretation Problem'. In contrast, two experiments addressing English children's pronoun production (Bloom, Barss, Nicol & Conway, 1994; de Villiers, Cahillane & Altreuter, 2006) show almost perfect usage. The aim of this study is to verify this asymmetry between pronoun production and pronoun comprehension for Dutch, and to investigate the effects of coherent discourse and topicality on pronoun production and comprehension. Employing a truth-value judgment task and an elicited production task, this study indeed finds such an asymmetry in 83 Dutch children (age range 4 ; 5-6 ; 6). When object pronouns were clearly established as the topic of the target sentence, the Pronoun Interpretation Problem dissolved entirely. These results are compatible with the asymmetrical grammar hypothesis of Hendriks & Spenader (2005/2006) and suggest, contrary to many previous claims, that children are highly proficient at using pragmatic clues in interpretation.

Data from child language comprehension shows that children make errors in interpreting pronouns as late as age 6;6, yet correctly comprehend reflexives from the age of 3;0. On the other hand, data from child language production shows that children correctly produce both pronouns and reflexives from the age of 2 or 3. Current explanations of this asymmetric delay in comprehension have either rejected the comprehension data outright or have argued that the problems are pragmatic or caused by processing limitations. In contrast our account, formulated in the framework of Optimality Theory, handles the comprehension data as well as the production data by arguing that children acquire the ability to reason about alternatives available to other conversation participants relatively late. It is this type of bidirectional reasoning, we argue, that is necessary for correctly interpreting pronouns. While our analysis is similar in spirit to the processing account given in Grodzinsky and Reinhart (1993) and Reinhart (to appear), it explains the data from the properties of the grammar, and is supported by related experimental evidence.. 1.Children's grasp of binding principles Children's comprehension of reflexives and pronounsThere is a well-known asymmetry in children's pattern of acquisition of the binding principles A and B. Children correctly interpret reflexives like adults from the age of 3;0 but they continue to perform poorly on the interpretation of pronouns even up to the age of 6;6 (Jakubowicz (1984); Koster and Koster (1986);Chien and Wexler (1990);McDaniel, Smith Cairns and Hsu (1990);McDaniel and Maxfield (1992); McKee (1992); see also Grimshaw and Rosen (1990) and Kaufman (1992) for a review). For example, presented in a context with two male referents, say Bert and Ernie, sentences like (1) are correctly understood from a young age (95% of the time according to some studies).However, children misinterpret the him in (2) as coreferring with the subject about half the time, which seems to be the result of chance performance.(1) Bert washed himself.(2) Bert washed him.For this Pronoun Interpretation Problem (also referred to as the Delay of Principle B Effect), a good explanation has yet to be given. 1.2Children's production of reflexives and pronouns 4Most experiments investigating the acquisition of the binding principles focus on comprehension. However, children's production data complicates the picture. The production research suggests that children do not have problems in producing reflexives or pronouns correctly.De Villiers, Cahillane and Altreuter (to appear) studied the production as well as the comprehension of reflexives and pronouns in 68 English speaking children between the ages of 4;6 and 7;2 (average age 6;2 years). Their study looked at two sentence types:two-sentence sequences like (3) and sentences with an embedded subordinate clause like (4). After being tested for comprehension with a truth-value judgment task, children were shown the pictures with the same type of content and aske...

Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) has been studied in great depth in theoretical linguistics, but empirical studies of VPE are rare. We extend the few previous corpus studies with an annotated corpus of VPE in all 25 sections of the Wall Street Journal corpus (WSJ) distributed with the Penn Treebank. We annotated the raw files using a stand-off annotation scheme that codes the auxiliary verb triggering the elided verb phrase, the start and end of the antecedent, the syntactic type of antecedent (VP, TV, NP, PP or AP), and the type of syntactic pattern between the source and target clauses of the VPE and its antecedent. We found 487 instances of VPE (including predicative ellipsis, antecedent-contained deletion, comparative constructions, and pseudo-gapping) plus 67 cases of related phenomena such as do so anaphora. Inter-annotator agreement was high, with a 0.97 average F-score for three annotators for one section of the WSJ. Our annotation is theory neutral, and has better coverage than earlier efforts that relied on automatic methods, e.g. simply searching the parsed version of the Penn Treebank for empty VP's achieves a high precision (0.95) but low recall (0.58) when compared with our manual annotation. The distribution of VPE source-target patterns deviates highly from the standard examples found in the theoretical linguistics literature on VPE, once more underlining the value of corpus studies. The resulting corpus will be useful for studying VPE phenomena as well as for evaluating natural language processing systems equipped with ellipsis resolution algorithms, and we propose evaluation measures for VPE detection and VPE antecedent selection. The stand-off annotation is freely available for research purposes.

No abstract

In some languages, distributive markers/quantifiers can attach to the argument that is being distributed (the distributive share), as opposed to the restrictor of the sentence (the distributive key). Researchers agree that distributive share markers can also distribute over events (and not only individuals), but disagree as to what these markers are semantically-universal distributive quantifiers or event plurality (pluractional) markers. In this paper, we experimentally probe spatial event distribution. On a universal quantification account, exhaustive distribution over a spatial distributive key is enforced, while on the pluractional analysis there is no such requirement. We carried out two picture verification experiments to test exhaustivity requirements in intransitive sentences with distributive share markers from two typologically different languages: the Serbian marker po and the Korean marker-ssik. We found evidence for an exhaustivity requirement over pluralities of non-atomic individuals (groups), but not over designated spatial locations. We interpret these findings as evidence that the semantics of (spatial) event distribution with distributive share markers involves a (spatial) distributive key. Specifically, po/-ssik have a universal quantificational force (with a meaning akin to per (each)) establishing a distributive relation between individual events and elements of the spatial distributive key. Plural individuals made salient in the visual input can serve to divide up the spatial key into chunks of space that have to be exhausted.