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Pronoun reversals: who, when, and why?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Philip S. Dale  and
Catherine Crain-Thoreson
Philip S. Dale*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Catherine Crain-Thoreson
Affiliation:
Western Washington University
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, University of Washington NI-25, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
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Abstract

Seventeen of a sample of 30 precocious talkers aged 1;8 produced at least one pronoun reversal (I/you) during unstructured play. This finding led to an examination of the role of cognitive and linguistic individual differences as well as contextual factors and processing complexity as determinants of pronoun reversal. Contrary to predictions derived from previous hypotheses, there were few differences between reversers and non-reversers, other than higher use of second person forms by reversers. Reversals were more likely to occur in certain contexts: semantically reversible predicates with two noun phrases, and in imitations (though the rate of imitation was lower overall in reversers). We propose that pronoun reversals commonly result from a failure to perform a deictic shift, which is especially likely when children's psycholinguistic processing resources are taxed. Children who did not produce any pronoun reversals tended to avoid pronoun use, especially second person forms. Overt reversal may thus reflect a risk-taking approach to language acquisition, which may be particularly characteristic of precocious children.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , October 1993 , pp. 573 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a grant from the John B. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Network on the Transition from Infancy to Childhood to Nancy Robinson, Philip Dale and Sharon Landesman. We are grateful to Carol Stoel-Gammon for her helpful comments on this paper, and to the parents and children in this project for their enthusiastic participation.

References

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