Hostname: page-component-669899f699-b58lm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-24T16:49:20.979Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Preschoolers' comprehension of pronouns and reflexives: the impact of the task*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 September 2011

CHRISTINA BERGMANN ,
MARKUS PAULUS  and
PAULA FIKKERT
CHRISTINA BERGMANN*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Arts, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
MARKUS PAULUS
Affiliation:
Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany
PAULA FIKKERT
Affiliation:
Faculty of Arts, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
*
Address for correspondence: Christina Bergmann, Faculty of Arts, Radboud University, P. O. Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands. e-mail: C.Bergmann@let.ru.nl
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Pronouns seem to be acquired in an asymmetrical way, where children confuse the meaning of pronouns with reflexives up to the age of six, but not vice versa. Children's production of the same referential expressions is appropriate at the age of four. However, response-based tasks, the usual means to investigate child language comprehension, are very demanding given children's limited cognitive resources. Therefore, they might affect performance. To assess the impact of the task, we investigated learners of Dutch (three- and four-year-olds) using both eye-tracking, a non-demanding on-line method, and a typical response-based task. Eye-tracking results show an emerging ability to correctly comprehend pronouns at the age of four. A response-based task fails to indicate this ability across age groups, replicating results of earlier studies. Additionally, biases seem to influence the outcome of the response-based task. These results add new evidence to the ongoing debate of the asymmetrical acquisition of pronouns and reflexives and suggest that there is less of an asymmetry than previously assumed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , September 2012 , pp. 777 - 803
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

[*]

The authors wish to thank the team at the Baby Research Centre Nijmegen, the Netherlands, which greatly supported this study, in particular Angela Khadar. Furthermore, we are thankful to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors who provided insightful recommendations on a previous version of this article.

References

REFERENCES

Aguiar, A. & Baillargeon, R. (2000). Perseveration and problem solving in infancy. In Reese, H. W. (ed.), Advances in child development and behavior, Vol. 27, 135–80. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Allopenna, P. D., Magnuson, J. S. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: Evidence for continuous mapping models. Journal of Memory and Language 38(4), 419–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S. & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes 22(4), 527–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R. & van Rijn, H. (1993). The CELEX Lexical Database. [CD-ROM]. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Baddeley, A. (1992). Working memory. Science 255(5044), 556–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloom, P., Barss, A., Nicol, J. & Conway, L. (1994). Children's knowledge of binding and coreference: Evidence from spontaneous speech. Language 70(1), 53–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chien, Y. C. & Wexler, K. (1990). Children's knowledge of locality conditions in binding as evidence for the modularity of syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1(3), 225–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding: the Pisa lectures. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.Google Scholar
Conroy, A., Takahashi, E., Lidz, J. & Phillips, C. (2009). Equal treatment for all antecedents: How children succeed with Principle B. Linguistic Inquiry 40(3), 446–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cowan, N., Nugent, L. D., Elliott, E. M., Ponomarev, I. & Saults, J. S. (1999). The role of attention in the development of short-term memory: Age differences in the verbal span of apprehension. Child Development 70(5), 1082–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Villiers, J., Cahillane, J. & Altreuter, E. (2006). What can production reveal about Principle B? In Deen, K. U., Nomura, J., Schulz, B. & Schwartz, B. D. (eds), Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition–North America, 89–100. Connecticut: University of Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics 4.Google Scholar
Diedrich, F. J., Highlands, T. M., Spahr, K. A., Thelen, E. & Smith, L. B. (2001). The role of target distinctiveness in infant perseverative reaching. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 78(3), 263–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Elbourne, P. (2005). On the acquisition of Principle B. Linguistic Inquiry 36(3), 333–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Francis, W. N. & Kučera, H. (1982). Frequency analysis of English usage. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.Google Scholar
Grodzinsky, Y. & Reinhart, T. (1993). The innateness of binding and coreference. Linguistic Inquiry 24(1), 69–101.Google Scholar
Hallett, P. E. (1986). Eye movements. In Boff, K. R., Kaufman, L. & Thomas, J. P. (eds), Handbook of perception and human performance, 10-1–10-112. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Hauf, P., Paulus, M. & Baillargeon, R. (2011). Infants use compression information to infer objects' weights: Examining cognition, exploration, and prospective action in a preferential-reaching task. Paper conditionally accepted for publication in Child Development.Google Scholar
Hendriks, P. & Koster, C. (2010). Production/comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition [Editorial]. Lingua 120(8), 1887–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hendriks, P. & Spenader, J. (2005/2006). When production precedes comprehension: An optimization approach to the acquisition of pronouns. Language Acquisition 13(4), 319–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hendriks, P., Spenader, J. & Smits, E. (2008). Frequency-based constraints on reflexive forms in Dutch. In Villadsen, J. & Henning, C. (eds), Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Constraints and Language Processing, 33–47. Roskilde: Computer Science Research Reports.Google Scholar
Hillert, D. & Ackerman, F. (2002). Accessing and parsing phrasal predicates. In Dehé, N., Jackendoff, R., McIntyre, A. & Urban, S. (eds), Verb-particle-explorations, 289–313. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakubowicz, C. (1984). On markedness and binding principles. In Jones, C. & Sells, P. (eds), Proceedings of the North Eastern Linguistics Society 14, 154–82, Amherst: GLSA.Google Scholar
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A. & Tomasello, M. (2009). Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3), 599–626.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pyykkönen, P., Matthews, D. & Järvikivi, J. (2010). Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension: A visual world study of pronoun resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes 25(1), 115–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reinhart, T. (2011). Processing or pragmatics? Explaining the coreference delay. In Gibson, E. & Pearlmutter, N. J. (eds) The processing and acquisition of reference, 157–94. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Reuland, E. J. (2001). Primitives of binding. Linguistic Inquiry 32(3), 439–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruigendijk, E., Baauw, S., Zuckerman, S., Vasic, N., de Lange, J. & Avrutin, S. (2011). A cross-linguistic study on the interpretation of pronouns by children and agrammatic speakers: Evidence from Dutch, Spanish and Italian. In Gibson, E. & Pearlmutter, N. J. (eds), The processing and acquisition of reference, 133–55. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sekerina, I., Stromswold, K. & Hestvik, A. (2004). How do adults and children process referentially ambiguous pronouns? Journal of Child Language 31(1), 123–52.Google ScholarPubMed
Smith, L. B. & Thelen, A. (2003). Development as a dynamic system Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(8), 343–48.Google ScholarPubMed
Spenader, J., Smits, E. J. & Hendriks, P. (2009). Coherent discourse solves the pronoun interpretation problem. Journal of Child Language 36(1), 3–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M., Eberhard, K. & Sedivy, J. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information during spoken language comprehension. Science 268(5217), 1632–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thelen, E., Schoner, G., Scheier, C. & Smith, L. B. (2001). The dynamics of embodiment: A field theory of infant perseverative reaching. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, 1–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Trueswell, J. & Gleitman, L. R. (2004). Children's eye movements during listening: Evidence for a constraint-based theory of parsing and word learning. In Henderson, J. M. & Ferreira, F. (eds), Interface of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world, 319–46. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. & Logrip, M. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition 73(2), 89–134.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yarbus, A. L. (1967). Eye movements and vision (trans. B. Haigh). New York: Plenum Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Kampen, N. J. (1994). The learnability of the left branch condition. In Bok-Bennema, R. & Cremers, C. (eds), Linguistics in the Netherlands, 83–94. Amsterdam/Philadelpha: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar