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Reference of pronouns may be constrained via lexical presuppositions, including marked F-features, implicated presuppositions, and deictic center shifting in certain languages.
This paper explores the acquisition of personal reference terms in Thai, a language that has a highly complex personal reference system. The participants of the study were 67 typicallydeveloping children (TD) and 29 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), a population which has long been observed to have difficulties with pronouns. The children were asked to complete simple production and comprehension tasks on personal reference terms. Overall, ASD children performed on par in production but significantly poorer in comprehension than TD children. Given the freedom of choice in the production task, ASD children preferred using fixed referential terms for self-reference, whereas TD children opted for personal pronouns. In terms of comprehension, ASD children were shown to generally be able to detect the person features but they seemed to struggle the most with the pragmatic aspects of personal reference terms. Our results support previous literature that lexical presuppositions are acquired earlier than implicated presuppositions. We add to the literature that the types or the amount of implicated presuppositions matter in acquisition
Imposters are grammatically third-person expressions used to refer to the firstperson speaker or second-person addressee (e.g. ‘the present authors’ when used to refer to the first-person writer, ‘Mommy’ or ‘Daddy’ when used by parents for self-reference in child-directed speech). Current analyses of imposters differ in whether they derive the unusual referential properties of imposters using syntactic means or attribute them to semantic and pragmatics. We aim to shed light on these competing approaches by means of a psycholinguistic experiment focusing on first-person imposters that investigates the kinds of pronouns (first-person vs. third-person) used to refer to imposter antecedents. Our results show that manipulating the prominence of the first-person speaker does not significantly boost the acceptability of first-person pronouns in imposter-referring contexts. However, our results suggest that a purely syntactic approach may not be sufficient either, as psycholinguistic processing factors also appear to be relevant.