A Comparison of Pronouns and Anaphors in Italian and English Acquisition

Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts

“…There is significant phonological overlap between reflexives and third person pronouns in English and it might be that children, having seen the picture, were expecting to hear ''The boy hit himself '' and did not notice that the ''self '' element was missing. Indeed in languages such as Italian, children make far fewer co-referencing errors (McKee 1992) perhaps because the o¤ending pronoun occurs earlier in the sentence and is phonetically very di¤erent to its reflexive counterpart (but see Avrutin 1999). Both of these factors would make the pronoun mismatch much easier to detect in the speech stream, something which connectionist modelers have argued is fundamental in anaphora resolution (Joanisse and Seidenberg 2003).…”

“…Chien and Wexler (1990) thus concluded that the children demonstrated knowledge of Principle B. Whilst many aspects of Chien and Wexler's account have been challenged (Avrutin 1994;Grimshaw and Rosen 1990;Grodzinsky and Reinhart 1993;McDaniel and Maxfield 1992;McKee 1992;), the general assumption that children will reject co-reference in sentences such as 2 due to knowledge of principle B has generally been accepted (see, for example, Baauw and Cuetos 2003;Philip 1999/2000;Thornton and Wexler 1999).…”

Production/comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition

“…From these studies, it can be concluded that some languages (such as English, Dutch, and Danish) display this effect, but other languages (such as Italian, French, and Norwegian) do not. Whereas English-speaking children frequently make errors in their interpretation of object pronouns, Italian-speaking children do not make errors in their interpretation of object clitics (McKee, 1992). Interestingly, the Delay of Principle B Effect seems to be sensitive to syntactic structure.…”

“…The difference between children's early mastery of Principle A and their late mastery of Principle B is generally referred to as the Delay of Principle B Effect. Many studies have addressed the Delay of Principle B Effect, from a theoretical as well as from an empirical perspective (e.g., Baauw & Cuetos, 2003;Bloom et al, 1994;Conroy et al, 2009;de Villiers et 4 al., 2006;Grodzinsky & Reinhart, 1993;Hendriks & Spenader, 2005/6;Matthews et al, 2009;McKee, 1992;Reinhart, 2006;Spenader et al, 2009;Thornton & Wexler, 1999;van Rij et al, to appear).…”

Relevance and L2 Learners’ Interpretation of Reflexive Anaphora in VP-Ellipsis: An Exploration of the Relationship between Relevance Theory and Typological Universals

“…In an attempt to establish the relevance of the information presented, they spent extra processing effort for no extra contextual effects: they found the ensuing information to be nonreferential to the foregoing experimental sentence. Thus, the following irrelevant information distracted the participants' ability to process the experimental sentences, leading to their lower performance in the experiment (For discussion of children's lower performance in such a context, see Chien & Wexler 1990, FosterCohen 1994, Grimshaw an Rosen 1990, McKee 1992. This explains why the participants performed more poorly in encoding the reflexive as a strict interpretation in the experimental sentences that are followed by a non-referential context (12) than they did when the ensuing information was relevant to the strict interpretation (11).…”