This article investigates the acquisition of pronominal resolution as a process instantiated at the syntax–discourse interface. Based on current psycholinguistic proposals concerning the gradual development from a more context-driven towards a linguistically constrained representation of discourse referents, we conducted an experimental study investigating the impact of the antecedent properties animacy and syntactic role on the resolution of personal and demonstrative pronouns. Participants were 3- and 5-year-old monolingual German- and Bulgarian-speaking children. Results suggest that the 3-year-olds establish one pronoun type as a default in their early anaphoric system. Five-year-olds resolve personal pronouns to the maximally salient antecedent which they determine by a joint consideration of the subject and animacy status of available referents. The resolution of demonstratives shows initial language-specific constraints.
AllenS.SkarabelaB.HughesM. (2008). Using corpora to examine discourse effects in syntax. In BehrensH. (Ed.), Corpora in language acquisition research: History, methods, perspectives (pp. 99–137). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
ArnoldJ. E.Brown-SchmidtS.TrueswellJ. C. (2007). Children’s use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22, 527–565.
4.
AvrutinS. (1999). Development of the syntax–discourse interface. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
5.
BaauwS.de RooE.AvrutinS. (2002). Determiner omission in language acquisition and language impairment: Syntactic and discourse factors. In SkarabelaB.FishS.DoA. H.-J. (Eds.), BUCLD 26: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, November 2–4, 2001, in Boston, MA (pp. 24–35). Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.
6.
BattistellaE. L. (1990). Markedness: The evaluative superstructure of language. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
7.
BeaverD. (2004). The optimization of discourse anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy, 27, 3–56.
8.
BittnerD. (2006). Case before gender in the acquisition of German. Folia Linguistica, XL, 115–134.
9.
BittnerD. (2007a). Early functions of definite articles and pronouns in German first language acquisition. In StarkE.LeissE.AbrahamW. (Eds.), Nominal determination: Typology, context constraints and historical emergence (pp. 215–240). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
10.
BittnerD. (2007b). Influence of animacy and grammatical role on production and comprehension of intersentential pronouns in German L1-acquisition. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 48, 103–138.
11.
BoschP.KatzG.UmbachC. (2007). The non-subject bias of German demonstrative pronouns. In Schwarz-FrieselM.ConstenM.KneesM. (Eds.), Anaphors in text: Cognitive, formal and applied approaches to anaphoric reference (pp. 145–164). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
12.
BoumaG.HoppH. (2007). Coreference preferences for personal pronouns in German. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 48, 53–74.
13.
CharalosovaK. (1995). Pokazatlnite mestoimenija v săvremennija bălgaraski knizhoven ezik. In StankovV. (Ed.), Problemi na gramatichnata sistema na bălgarskija ezik (pp. 179–221). Sofia: Akademichno izdatelstvo ‘Marin Drinov’.
14.
ClahsenH. (1991). Child language and developmental dysphasia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
15.
ComrieB. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
16.
CrawleyR. A.StevensonR. J.KleinmanD. (1990). The use of heuristic strategies in the interpretation of pronouns. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 19, 245–264.
17.
DahlÖ. (2008). Animacy and egophoricity: Grammar, ontology and phylogeny. Lingua, 118, 141–151.
18.
GernsbacherM. A.HargreavesD. (1988). Accessing sentence participants: The advantage of first mention. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 699–717.
19.
GivónT. (1983). Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In GivónT. (Ed.), Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study (pp. 1–42). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
20.
GordonP. C.HendrickR. (1998). The representation and processing of coreference in discourse. Cognitive Science, 22, 389–424.
21.
GroszB. J.JoshiA. K.WeinsteinS. (1995). Centering: A framework for modelling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21, 203–225.
22.
GundelJ. K.HedbergN.ZacharskiR. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69, 274–307.
23.
HeimI. (1988). The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. New York: Garland.
24.
HeimI. (1998). Anaphora and semantic interpretation: A reinterpretation of Reinhart’s approach. In SauerlandU.PercusO. (Eds.), The interpretive tract: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 25 (pp. 205–246). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
25.
HickmannM.HendriksH. (1999). Cohesion and anaphora in children’s narratives: A comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language, 26, 419–452.
26.
JackendoffR. (2002). Foundations of language: Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
27.
JaegerT. F.GerassimovaV. A. (2002). Bulgarian word order and the role of the direct object clitic in LFG. Proceedings of the LFG02 Conference. Stanford, CA. CSLI. Retrieved from http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/7/lfg02-toc.html
28.
KaiserE. (2005). Different forms have different referential properties: Implications for the notion of salience. In BrancoA.McEneryT.MitkovR. (Eds.), Anaphora processing: Linguistic, cognitive and computational modelling (pp. 261–282). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
29.
KampH.ReyleU. (1993). From discourse to logic. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
30.
KuehnastM. (2007). Production and comprehension of intersentential pronominal reference in early child Bulgarian: An experimental study. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 48, 171–202.
31.
LevinsonS. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
32.
LoukusaS.LeinonenE.RyderN. (2007). Development of pragmatic language comprehension in Finnish-speaking children. First Language, 27, 279–296.
33.
MandlerJ. M. (1992). How to build a baby II: Conceptual primitives. Psychological Review, 99, 587–604.
34.
MitkovR. (2002). Anaphora resolution. New York: Longman.
35.
MolinaM.van de WalleG. A.CondryK.SpelkeE. S. (2004). The animate–inanimate distinction in infancy: Developing sensitivity to constraints on human actions. Journal of Cognition and Development, 5, 399–426.
36.
NicolovaR. (1986). Bălgarskite mestoimenija [The Bulgarian pronouns]. Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo.
37.
NieuwlandM. S.van BerkumJ. J. A. (2006). Individual differences and contextual bias in pronoun resolution: Evidence from ERPs. Brain Research, 1118, 155–167.
38.
O’NeillD. K. (1996). Two-year-old children’s sensitivity to parent’s knowledge state when making requests. Child Development, 67, 659–677.
39.
Prat-SalaM.BraniganH. (1999). Discourse constraints on syntactic processing in language production: A cross-linguistic study in English and Spanish. Journal of Memory and Language, 42, 168–182.
40.
RoseR. (2007). Pronoun resolution and the influence of syntactic and semantic information on discourse prominence. In BrancoA. (Ed.), Anaphora: Analysis, algorithms and applications. Selected papers of the 6th DAARC Conference, Lagos, Portugal, March (pp. 28–43).
41.
RozendaalM. (2008). The acquisition of reference: A cross-linguistic study. Utrecht: LOT.
42.
RuigendijkE.BaauwS.ZuckermanS.VasićN.de LangeJ.AvrutinS. (in press). A cross-linguistic study on the interpretation of pronouns by children and agrammatic speakers: Evidence from Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. In GibsonE.PerlmutterN. (Eds.), The processing and acquisition of reference. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
43.
RyderN.LeinonenE. (2003). Use of context in question answering by 3, 4, and 5 year old children. International Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32, 397–415.
44.
WexlerK. (1998). Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: A new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua, 106, 23–79.
45.
WykesT. (1981). Inference and children’s comprehension of pronouns. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 32, 264–278.
