ZASPiL 48 = Intersentential pronominal reference in child and adult language
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- Referenzidentität (8)
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This paper investigates the production and comprehension of intrasentential anaphoric pronominal reference in Russian. In particular, it examines the elicited imitation and comprehension of three anaphoric pronouns in subject position – personal 3rd singular masculine, demonstrative and zero – in one hundred and eighty monolingual Russian-speaking children and twenty adults. The three types of pronouns were designed to have an antecedent in the preceding sentence containing a verb and two arguments. These antecedents differ in their syntactical role and animacy. The sentence position, agentivity and topicality remained constant. The sentences with (in)animate subjects and objects constituted the following four 'conditions': two sentences with a subject and an object being either animate or inanimate and two sentences with a subject and an object exhibiting a diverse (in)animacy. Regarding the resolution of the anaphoric pronouns the similarity principle (or feature-concord rule) and its possible violations were tested. This principle suggests that an anaphoric pronoun is most likely resolved to the antecedent with a maximum of similar characteristics or features and it primarily governs the assignment of an antecedent to anaphoric pronouns in subject position in the absence of the violating conditions. Results show the influence of this rule on the anaphora resolution process increasing with age, on the one hand, and the development of the impact of animacy, syntactic role and the type of anaphoric pronouns that violate the feature-concord rule, on the other.
The paper presents results from a combined production and comprehension study addressing some of the factors which guide the establishment of intersentential pronominal reference in child and adult Bulgarian. We investigate the time course and different stages in the acquisition of null, personal and demonstrative pro-nouns and their specific anaphoric functions. We target possible age-induced changes in the salience hierarchy of referent features such as animacy and grammatical role. Following the general consent in the field of anaphora research, we assume a division of labour between different pronominal forms with respect to the salience of their referents. Based on the data of Bulgarian preschool children we investigate the validity of this form-function relation, its language-specific shape and its developmentally induced variation. The results reveal an initial prominence of animate referents which later on develops into preference for animate subjects. Although the investigated 3 to 5 year old Bulgarian children do not stick to the adult anaphora resolution strategy, they comply with the principle of the reversed mapping within the range of tested pronouns and react according to their salience criteria which promote animate subjects as the most prominent co-reference candidates.
Previous work examining the role of antecedent accessibility in pronominal coreference has often linked coreference to prominent structural positions that in turn are linked to information structure statuses such as topic. Three experiments examine the influence of topichood independently of structural prominence by exploring the influence of the pragmatic notion of aboutness on the written production of pronominal coreferring expressions. The results show that being mentioned in an about-phrase increases the likelihood that a referent will be selected as the future topic of a following sentence as well as increasing the proportion of responses with early, pronominal coreference to that referent, at the expense of coreference with the subject. These results suggest that coreference is sensitive to the status of other, structurally non-prominent referents in discourse, and that the pragmatic notion of aboutness influences pronominal coreference.
In anaphora resolution theory, it has been assumed that anaphora resolution is based on a reversed mapping of antecedent salience and anaphora complexity: minimal complex anaphora refer to maximal salient antecedents. In order to ex-amine whether and by which developmental steps German children gain command of this mapping maxim we conducted an experiment on production and comprehension of intersentential pronouns including the three pronoun types zero, personal, and demonstrative pronoun. With respect to antecedent salience, the experiment varied syntactic role (subject/object) and in/animacy. Six age groups of children (age range from 2;0 to 6;0) and an adult control group has been tested. The hypothesis arising from the mapping maxim is that zero pronoun correlates with more salient antecedents than personal and demonstrative pronoun, the latter correlating with the least salient antecedents. The results are: In production, children first establish the opposition of zero pronoun with animate antecedents vs. demonstrative pronoun with inanimate antecedents. In a next step, syntactic role comes into play and a more complex system opposing the three presented pronoun types is established. In comprehension, however, the effect of pronoun type re-mains weak and antecedent features remain a strong factor in reference choice. However, also adults employ pronoun type and antecedent features. The oldest children and the adults show variation in personal pronoun resolution according to the animacy pattern of the potential antecedents. In case of identical animacy features, the subject is the preferred candidate; in case of distinct animacy features, there is a tendency to choose the object antecedent.
This paper presents psycholinguistic evidence on the factors governing the resolution of German personal pronouns. To determine the relative influence of linear order versus grammatical function of potential antecedents, two interpretation-preference tasks were designed. Their specific aim was to disentangle salience factors conflated in previous research on pronoun interpretation, such as linear or-der, first mention and topicalization. Experiment 1 tested pronoun resolution to non-sentence-initial position (scrambling) and Experiment 2 tested pronoun resolution to sentence-initial position (topicalization). The results across different verb types and across different syntactic contexts in Experiments 1 and 2 show that grammatical function, yet neither linear order, first mention nor topicalization predicts pronoun resolution in German.
This paper discusses results from a corpus study of German demonstrative and personal pronouns and from a reading time experiment in which we compared the interpretation options of the two types of pronouns (Bosch et al. 2003, 2007). A careful review of exceptions to a generalisation we had been suggesting in those papers (the Subject Hypothesis: "Personal pronouns prefer subject antecedents and demonstratives prefer non-subject antecedents") shows that, although this generalisation correctly describes a tendency in the data, it is quite wrong in claiming that the grammatical role of antecedents is the relevant parameter. In the current paper we argue that the generalisation should be formulated in terms of in-formation-structural properties of referents rather than in terms of the grammatical role of antecedent expressions.
It is well known that English children between the age of 4 and 6 display a so-called Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in that they allow pronouns to refer to a local c-commanding antecedent. Their guessing pattern with pronouns contrasts with their adult-like interpretation of reflexives. The DPBE has been explained as resulting from a lack of pragmatic knowledge or insufficient cognitive resources. However, such extra-grammatical accounts cannot explain why the DPBE only shows up in particular languages and in particular syntactic environments. Moreover, such accounts fail to explain why the DPBE only emerges in comprehension and not in production. This paper hypothesizes that the presence or absence of the DPBE can be explained from the properties of the grammar. Fischer's (2004) optimality-theoretic analysis of binding, explaining cross-linguistic variation, and Hendriks and Spenader's (2005/6) optimality-theoretic account of the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives are combined into a single model. This model yields testable predictions with respect to the presence or absence of the DPBE in particular languages, in particular syntactic environments, and in comprehension and/or production.
This paper presents results of corpus analytic investigations of children's use of referring expressions and considers possible implications of this work for questions relating to development of theory of mind. The study confirms previous findings that children use the full range of referring forms (definite and indefinite articles, demonstrative determiners, and demonstrative and personal pronouns) appropriately by age 3 or earlier. It also provides support for two distinct stages in mind-reading ability. The first, which is implicit and non-propositional, includes the ability to assess cognitive statuses such as familiarity and focus of attention in relation to the intended referent; the second, which is propositional and more conscious, includes the ability to assess epistemic states such as knowledge and belief. Distinguishing these two stages supports attempts to reconcile seemingly inconsistent results concerning the age at which children develop theory of mind. It also makes it possible to explain why children learn to use forms correctly be-fore they exhibit the pragmatic ability to consider and calculate quantity implicatures.
This paper deals with the development of discourse competence in German-, Russian- and Bulgarian-speaking children. In particular, it examines the use of anaphoric pronominal reference in elicited narrations of children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. As the pronominal (and nominal) systems of target German, Russian and Bulgarian differ in the repertoire and functions of anaphoric elements we will examine which kind of noun phrases children use to make reference to story participants. In a second step of the analysis, we will investigate how pronominal expressions relate to antecedents. In this respect the pronominal form of the anaphor, the syntactic function of the antecedent and the distance between antecedent and anaphor will be analyzed. The findings will be discussed with regard to predictions made by proposals such as the Complementary Hypothesis (Bosch, Rozario, and Zhao 2003) which assumes an asymmetry between the use of personal pro-nouns and demonstrative pronouns when referring back to subject or object antecedents.