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When do children avoid backwards coreference?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Jennifer Ryan Hsu ,
Helen Smith Cairns ,
Sarita Eisenberg  and
Gloria Schlisselberg
Jennifer Ryan Hsu*
Affiliation:
The William Paterson College of New Jersey
Helen Smith Cairns
Affiliation:
Queens College and The City University of New York
Sarita Eisenberg
Affiliation:
City University of New York
Gloria Schlisselberg
Affiliation:
Hofstra University
*
Department of Communication Disorders, The William Paterson College of New Jersey, Wayne, NJ 07470, USA.
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Abstract

This study investigated the claim that very young children avoid backwards coreference in their interpretation of sentences containing pronouns. Eighty-one children ranging in age from 3;1 to 8;0 and eight adults acted out four types of pronominal sentences. Cross-sectional data and individual response patterns reveal that children initially, prefer internal coreference even when such a response is disallowed for structural reasons. Avoidance of backwards coreference appears to be a late developing phenomenon characteristic of six-year-olds. Adult response patterns, which are manifested by some very young children, emerge as the dominant pattern by age seven.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 339 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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Footnotes

*

We are grateful to the following individuals for granting us permission to interview children attending their schools: Mrs Lenore Rappaport, Director of the Bayside Kindergarten and Nursery School in Bayside, New York; the Director of the Big Apple School in Brooklyn, New York; the Director of the Glen Ridge Elementary School in Glen Ridge, New Jersey; and the Director of the Montclair Montessori School in Upper Montclair, New jersey. We appreciate the co-operation of the parents, teachers and children from all of the schools. We thank Vivian Hsu and Dr Tom Maxfield for developing the computer program used to generate unique sets of randomly ordered experimental sentences for each subject; Dr Dana McDaniel for her advice and assistance in some of the data collection; and Dr Louis Hsu for his advice concerning the statistical analyses of our data. All mistakes, of course, are our own.

References

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