Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts
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Danielle Matthews
Abstract
This study tests accounts of co-reference errors whereby children allow “Mama Bear” and “her” to co-refer in sentences like “Mama Bear is washing her” (Chien and Wexler, Language Acquisition 1: 225–295, 1990). 63 children aged 4;6, 5;6 and 6;6 participated in a truth-value judgment task augmented with a sentence production component. There were three major finding: 1) contrary to predictions of most generativist accounts, children accepted co-reference even in cases of bound anaphora e.g., “Every girl is washing her” 2) contrary to Thornton and Wexler (Principle B, VP Ellipsis and Interpretation in Child Grammar, The MIT Press, 1999), errors did not appear to occur because children understood referring expressions to be denoting the same person in different guises 3) contrary to usage-based accounts, errors were less likely in sentences that contained lower as opposed to higher frequency verbs. Error rates also differed significantly according to pronoun type (“him”, “her”, “them”). These challenging results are discussed in terms of possible processing explanations.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction
- Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis
- going-to-V and gonna-V in child language: A quantitative approach to constructional development
- The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses
- The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies
- Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts
- A dynamic view of usage and language acquisition
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction
- Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis
- going-to-V and gonna-V in child language: A quantitative approach to constructional development
- The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses
- The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies
- Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts
- A dynamic view of usage and language acquisition
