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The Comprehension of Pronominal Reference in Children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

David Ingram
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
Catherine Shaw
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia

Extract

Years ago, Piaget (1926:121) reported the fact that children, in their spoken language, show little concern for identifying the appropriate antecedents of their pronouns. In the texts he presented, they would typically introduce one or more antecedents followed by a series of pronouns. Such examples show a simple rule of linear order whereby a pronoun needs to refer to an antecedent somewhere preceding it. Further, this rule appeared to characterize the productive language of older children in the years five to ten, when much of the structure of language has already been acquired.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1988

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