What can we learn from children’s errors in understanding anaphora?

Abstract

In this experiment we compare how 96 Dutch children from six to ten years of age interpret sentences in which two different kinds of anaphoric relations are expressed: the relations between pronouns and antecedents are either reflexive or nonreflexive. The sentences are constructed in such a way that the grammatical subject of a complex noun phrase encompasses two possible antecedents for the reflexive or nonreflexive anaphoric pronoun that follows. The interpretation of these sentences is tested in a task in which four systematically composed pictures are presented. The subject's job is to choose the picture that agrees best with the sentence. The results indicate that there is a difference in rate of acquisition for the correct sentenceinternal interpretation of reflexive and nonreflexive anaphora. Children's understanding of both types of anaphora approaches the adult standard gradually, but that of reflexive anaphora is accelerated relative to nonreflexive anaphora. We surmise that the differential rates of acquisition are linked to structural characteristics of the two anaphora types. It may be easier for children to learn the interpretation of linguistic structures which formally involve 'c(onstituent)-command' than those structures which do not represent 'c-command'.

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

“…Wexler and Chien (1985) and Chien and Wexler (1990) demonstrated that children's responses to senkences containing reflexives are dmost perfect (i.e., ahnost always correct). However, pronoun performance was significantly worse: In many cases it was close to chance.2 This result has been replicated in many other studies and in different languages (Deutch, Koster, and Koster (1986), Rosen (1990), &Daniel, Cairns, andThorntyn (1990) replicated these results with quantifier who, which functions as an operator. Comparison of sentences containing pronouns and reflexives suggests prima facie that children acquire Principle A of the Binding Theory significantly earlier than Principle B.…”

Spanish as a second language when L1 is Quechua: Endangered languages and the SLA researcher

“…Kalt's study uses a task adapted from Deutsch et al (1986) to test children's comprehension and production of the third person object pronoun le vs. reflexive se.…”

Second language acquisition and Binding Principle B: child/adult differences

“…As noted in the Introduction, there has been extensive investigation of the binding principles in L1 acquisition and it has frequently been reported that children show considerable delay in acquiring properties related to Principle B, performing inaccurately in experimental tasks with respect to possible antecedents for pronouns well after the age of 6 (e.g., Chien and Wexler, 1990;Solan, 1987) and often not achieving adult-like performance until the age of 8 or 9 (Deutsch et al, 1986). In contrast, children perform accurately on Principle A often by age 4, recognizing the locality condition on reflexives.…”

“…A potential case in point involves Principle B of the Binding Theory, which governs the distribution of pronouns (Chomsky, 1981). Numerous studies have revealed a discrepancy between child and adult coreference judgements for pronouns: first language (L1) acquirers have considerable difficulty in mastering properties related to Principle B (e.g., Chien and Wexler, 1990;Deutsch et al, 1986;McDaniel et al, 1990). On most 426 SLA and Binding Principle B accounts, this delay does not reflect a competence problem; children's difficulties are attributed to other factors -for example, lack of certain pragmatic principles, processing problems relating to memory capacity, or problems with the tasks employed to test knowledge of Binding Theory (Chien and Wexler, 1990;Grimshaw and Rosen, 1990;Grodzinksy and Reinhart, 1993;Reinhart, 1986).…”