The role of number of referents and animacy in children's use of pronouns

Serratrice, Ludovica

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2013.05.008

Cited by 27 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Children in Koster et al’s (2011) study interpreted the pronoun as referring to the first-mentioned character in a context story, both when this character was consistently the discourse topic and when there was a shift in the topic of the story. Production studies also suggest that children are sensitive to referential properties of pronouns, as well as to the extra-sentential or extra-linguistic context, when they choose which referring expression to utter (see Serratrice, 2013 and references therein). Together, these studies suggest that, from early on, children are sensitive to discourse properties of pronouns such as topicality or order-of-mention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Discourse accessibility constraints in children’s processing of object relative clauses

2015

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Children’s poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms. We conducted a visual-world study designed to test the off-line comprehension and on-line processing of object relatives in German-speaking 5-year-olds. Children were tested on three types of object relatives, all having a full DP head noun and differing with respect to the type of nominal phrase that appeared in the embedded subject position: another full DP, a 1st- or a 3rd-person pronoun. Grammatical skills and memory capacity were also assessed in order to see whether and how they affect children’s performance. Most accurately processed were object relatives with 1st-person pronoun, independently of children’s language and memory skills. Performance on object relatives with two full DPs was overall more accurate than on object relatives with 3rd-person pronoun. In the former condition, children with stronger grammatical skills accurately processed the structure and their memory abilities determined how fast they were; in the latter condition, children only processed accurately the structure if they were strong both in their grammatical skills and in their memory capacity. The results are discussed in the light of accounts that predict different pronoun effects like the ones we find, which depend on the referential properties of the pronouns. We then discuss which role language and memory abilities might have in processing object relatives with various embedded nominal phrases.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 2 We use the term ‘referring expression’ to mean any linguistic form that relates to some discourse referent. This term thus includes both definite noun phrases (full DPs) and pronouns (see Fukumura and van Gompel, 2012 ; Serratrice, 2013 ). …”

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confidence: 99%

Discourse accessibility constraints in children’s processing of object relative clauses

2015

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“…A number of studies have investigated children's sensitivity to the discourse status of the referent and its visual availability to the addressee (Campbell et al, 2000;Demir, So, Özyürek & Goldin-Meadow, 2012;Graf, Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello, 2015;Matthews et al, 2006;Serratrice, 2008Serratrice, , 2013. By crossing linguistic mention and visual presence of a competitor in this study's design, we have been able to assess the relative and joint contribution of both factors to the speaker's discourse model.…”

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confidence: 99%

Individual differences in the production of referential expressions: The effect of language proficiency, language exposure and executive function in bilingual and monolingual children

Serratrice

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2019

Bilingualism

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One hundred and seventy-two English-speaking 5- to 7-year-olds participated in a referential communication task where we manipulated the linguistic mention and the visual presence of a competitor alongside a target referent. Eighty-seven of the children were additionally exposed to a language other than English (bilinguals). We measured children's language proficiency, verbal working memory (WM), cognitive control skills, family SES, and relative amount of cumulative exposure and use of the home language for the bilinguals. Children's use of full Noun Phrases (NPs) to identify a target referent was predicted by the visual presence of a competitor more than by its linguistic mention. Verbal WM and proficiency predicted NP use, while cognitive control skills predicted both the ability to use expressions signalling discourse integration and sensitivity to the presence of a discourse competitor, but not of a visual competitor. Bilingual children were as informative as monolingual children once proficiency was controlled for.

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“…The accessibility status of a referent is determined by many factors, such as the referent's information status (givenness, salience), frequency and recency of mention in prior discourse, the referent's structural position in the preceding utterance, animacy, uniqueness and a number of possible referents mentioned in prior discourse or visible in the scene of a conversation, among others. From a pragmatic perspective, the possible referents are present in the speaker's mind, with the aforementioned factors creating a different activation value (see Arnold & Griffin 2007;Fukumura et al 2010;Serratrice 2013). Additional variables, such as mention of other possible referents can influence the speaker-internal level of attention resulting in the use of more or less informative forms.The choice of referential expressions is pragmatically determined by the complex mental representation of the discourse and by the amount of information needed for the conceptualisation of referents.…”

Section: Referential Expressions From the Pragmatic And Syntactic Permentioning

confidence: 99%

On the C/edge linking mechanism. Evidence from Polish

Sopata

2017

Lingua Posnaniensis

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The main aim of the paper is to examine Polish data from the perspective of Sigurðsson’s (2011, 2014) theory of C/edge linking. The crucial point of the theory lies in the hypothesis that phases are equipped with silent edge features which enable narrow syntax to link to context. All definite arguments, overt as well as null arguments, must be successfully C/edge linked, e.g. they have to match at least one feature in the broad C-domain. The present study focuses on utterances in Polish with direct object expressed as pronoun or null.The account proves successful in explaining some distributional patterns of null vs. pronoun objects in Polish. The Polish data investigated in this study indicates that the theory of silent edge linkers providing a communication channel for syntax and context is a step towards understanding the relation between syntax and pragmatics better.

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The role of number of referents and animacy in children's use of pronouns

Cited by 27 publications

References 16 publications

Discourse accessibility constraints in children’s processing of object relative clauses

Discourse accessibility constraints in children’s processing of object relative clauses

Individual differences in the production of referential expressions: The effect of language proficiency, language exposure and executive function in bilingual and monolingual children

On the C/edge linking mechanism. Evidence from Polish

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