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The Acquisition of Reference
Edited by Ludovica Serratrice and Shanley E.M. Allen
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 15] 2015
► pp. 213–239

Online evidence for children’s interpretation of personal pronouns

Traditional language acquisition research that employs offline tasks, such as act-out, pointing, sentence-picture matching, truth-value and grammaticality judgments, has established that children up to the age of 6 make mistakes in the comprehension of anaphoric expressions. With the adaptation of the Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm (VWP) for language acquisition, it has become possible to investigate the interpretation of anaphoric expressions in children in real time to gain a better understanding of the development of pronominal reference. This chapter provides an overview of the VWP studies of 3- to 9-year-old children’s comprehension of reflexives and personal pronouns in terms of various linguistic constraints and their interaction. There is a developmental trajectory of such constraints, with morphological (gender) and lexico-semantic (verb transitivity) constraints being acquired first, followed by syntactic constraints (Principles A and B of the Binding Theory). Discourse-level constraints, such as information structure and order-of-mention, develop last and often need to be present in combination for children to apply them online.

Keywords: Binding Theory, constraints, discourse, Dutch, gender, German, online, order-of-mention, verb transitivity, Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm (VWP)
Published online: 25 November 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.15.09sek
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