Development of Principle B in Russian: Coindexation at LF and Coreference

Abstract

This article presents evidence in the development of Russian for a theory that says that children at a certain a.ge know a syntactic principle (Principle B of the Binding Theory) that governs the distribution of pronouns but that they do not know a pragmatic or semantic principle (Principle P) that restricts the situations in which NPs may be contraindexed. The major result concerns Russian possessive pronouns that must be disjoint from subject antecedents. We show that this result follows from the raising of pronouns at Logical Form together with Principles B and P. The prediction thus is that children who do not know Principle P will accept this sentence. We experimentally confirm this result. We also predict that children will reject sentences with possessive pronouns that are bound by quantifiers. We also confirm this prediction. Along the way we replicate in Russian known results in English and other languages. The pattern of results provides strong support for the Principle P/modularity theory.

On the Acquisition of Principle B

“…Let me just note briefly that in Avrutin and Wexler's (1992) study, there was no large difference between the percentage of incorrect acceptances of a pronoun with a local referential antecedent (52%) and the percentage of incorrect acceptances of a pronoun with a local DP antecedent involving the word for 'every' experiments of Thornton and Wexler 1999 (section 2.1), since one of these displays in a particularly clear form the main experimental factor that I will be talking about. I will then examine Chien and Wexler 1990 (section 2.2), Thornton 1990 (section 2.3), Boster 1991 (section 2.4), and Avrutin and Thornton 1994 (section 2.5).…”

Spanish-speaking children do not always overuse estar

“…In addition, following general experimental findings that children perform significantly worse when the interpretation of linguistic terms requires knowledge of the interaction of syntactic & discourse-related constraints (Avrutin & Wexler, 1992;Noveck, 2001;Papafragou & Musolino, 2003;Schmitt et al, 2004), it was predicted that children would have more problems when the copula choice depends on discourse factors alone.…”

Equal Treatment for All Antecedents: How Children Succeed with Principle B

“…For example, Grolla (2005) used a picture verification task in which only an anaphoric antecedent was provided in the test scenarios, leaving children with no alternative candidate referent for the pronoun. Avrutin and Wexler (1992) conducted a TVJT study on Russian that shares many design features with the scenario in (20) from Thornton and Wexler 1999 that we discussed at length in section 3. It is therefore not surprising that Avrutin and Wexler found error rates in the referential condition that were similar to those reported by Thornton and Wexler (1999), although it is surprising that the Russian-speaking children showed similarly high error rates in the quantificational condition.…”