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

Abstract

Children have repeatedly been found to exhibit Principle B violations, with some reports that these violations occur only with nonquantified antecedents. This quantificational asymmetry (QA) in the delay of Principle B effect (DPBE) has been taken as support for a theory that restricts the scope of binding theory to bound variable anaphora (Reinhart 1983). However, the QA has been challenged, on the basis of discrepant findings and methodological concerns (Elbourne 2005). Here, we resolve the status of the QA with 3 studies and a review of over 30 previous studies. Using improved experimental materials, we show that children disallow local pronoun binding with both referential and quantificational antecedents when Principle B is at issue (Experiment 1), but not when Principle B is neutralized (Experiment 2). When methodological flaws are reintroduced, we replicate the QA (Experiment 3). Drawing on evidence from adult language processing, we suggest that the role of Principle B as a filter on representations during sentence understanding, in concert with pragmatic infelicities in the tasks used, accounts for the wide variability in the DPBE in the literature.

Production/comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition

“…found that children do not perform better with quantifier binding (Conroy et al, 2009;Matthews et al, 2009). This casts serious doubt on the theoretical distinction between variable binding and coreference in pronoun interpretation.…”

“…Several studies (e.g., Bloom et al, 1994;Conroy et al, 2009) have adopted this line of argumentation to dismiss the comprehension results in favor of the production results. These studies conclude that children do possess the relevant knowledge of grammar, even though they make errors in comprehension experiments.…”

“…These studies conclude that children do possess the relevant knowledge of grammar, even though they make errors in comprehension experiments. Comprehension errors are made because children are, for some unknown reason, more sensitive to the felicity conditions associated with the use of particular forms than adults are (Conroy et al, 2009;Crain et al, 1996;Gualmini, 2004). …”

An Emergentist Approach to Syntax

“…As established in a variety of comprehension studies (e.g., Wexler & Chien 1985), children typically interpret reflexive pronouns correctly more than 95% of the time from a very early age (as young as age 3). In contrast, performance on plain pronouns during the same period is usually significantly lower, hovering between 50% and 85%, depending on how carefully the supporting contexts are constructed (Conroy et al 2008). Moreover, typical errors involve interpreting the pronoun in patterns such as Donald Duck washed him as coreferential with the subject-i.e., as if it were a reflexive pronoun.…”

Processing Binding Relations in Specific Language Impairment

“…This literature is characterized by numerous methodological issues (see extensive discussions in Conroy, Takahasi, Lidz, & Phillips, 2009;Elbourne, 2005;Grimshaw & Rosen, 1990). In truth-value judgment tasks, the experimenter acts out a scene, a puppet or the experimenter makes a statement, and the child judges the statement as true or false in relation to the acted out scene.…”