The Comprehension of Pronominal Reference in Children

Abstract

Years ago, Piaget (1926:121) reported the fact that children, in their spoken language, show little concern for identifying the appropriate antecedents of their pronouns. In the texts he presented, they would typically introduce one or more antecedents followed by a series of pronouns. Such examples show a simple rule of linear order whereby a pronoun needs to refer to an antecedent somewhere preceding it. Further, this rule appeared to characterize the productive language of older children in the years five to ten, when much of the structure of language has already been acquired.

Backward Versus Forward Anaphora: Reconstruction in Child Grammar

“…In addition, Hsu et al (1989) presented data obtained in an act-out task suggesting that children have difficulty in handling ungrammatical cases of forward anaphora. Finally, using a question-answer test, Ingram and Snow (1981) found that children accept an anaphoric reading in (30a) as much as they do in (30b)-that is, in 78% of the cases. Carden (1986), and Hsu et al (1989) came to the conclusion that children perform better on ungrammatical cases of backward anaphora than on ungrammatical cases of forward anaphora, a claim that is disputed by Lust et al (1992) (see also references cited there).…”

“…Some studies have addressed the issue of whether children's comprehension of sentences like (2a) and (2b) is guided by a unique principle. However, on one hand, conflicting results were obtained, probably because of the experimental material employed (see Carden (1986), Hsu, Cairns, Eisenberg, and Schlisselberg (1989), Ingram and Snow (1981), Lust, Loveland, and Kornet (1980)). On the other hand, it was observed that, beyond Principle C, other factors appear to influence children's performance.…”

When do children avoid backwards coreference?

“…Based on a definition proposed by Reinhart (1976Reinhart ( , 1981 one node c-commands another if the branching node dominating the first node also dominates the second. the deer will jump over over the fence Using a variety of methodologies, a number of researchers (Chomsky, 1969;Lust, Loveland & Kornet, 1980;Solan, 1983;Crain & McKee, 1985;Goodluck, 1987;Ingram & Shaw, 1988;Hsu, Cairns, Eisenberg & Schlisselberg, 1989;and McDaniel, Cairns & Hsu, 1990) have investigated [1] Reinhart (1981:612) defines c-command as follows: 'Node A c(onstituent)-commands node B iff the branching node most immediately dominating A also dominates B'. 1.…”

“…Additional studies which used questioning tasks (Chomsky, 1969;Ingram'& Shaw, 1988) or act-out tasks (Tavakolian, 1977;Solan, 1983) report that some children manifest consistent patterns of external reference (i.e. Despite the fact that neither (4) nor (5) are restricted by structural principles, performance is consistently better on the unrestricted forwards sentences than on the unrestricted backwards ones.…”

“…In addition, they suggest that the directionality constraint may be related to the branching direction of a language. Ingram & Shaw (1988) conducted a study which examined the response patterns of individual children. A common feature of these analyses and that of Lust and her colleagues is that the restriction is considered to be a part of the child's early grammar.…”