Development of the Syntax-Discourse Interface

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).…”

Morphosyntactic Learning and the Development of Tense

“…Still another group of theories links RI to nonsyntactic performance limitations. For instance, Avrutin (1999) suggests that RI results from children's limited resources to carry out utterance planning and other pragmatic computation, while Phillips (1995) attributes RI to the failure of merging the Tense node with the verb, resulting from not-yet-automatic use of morphological knowledge.…”

Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns

“…For example, children as young as 3 years of age show signs of knowing that the pronoun himself in (2) must refer to Papa Bear, while the pronoun him in (3) cannot (e.g., Avrutin, 1999;Grimshaw and Rosen, 1990, among many others). These coreference patterns are described by the principles of Chomsky's Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981).…”