Pronoun preferences of children in a language without typical third-person pronouns

Abstract

This study presents comprehension data from 6–7-and 8–10-year-old children as well as adults on the acceptability of null vs overt anaphoric forms (the demonstrative hura ‘that’ and the quasipronoun bera ‘(s)he, him-/herself’) in Basque, a language without true third-person pronouns. In an acceptability judgement task, a developmental change occurred in the preference for hura (Experiment 1): 6–7-year-olds showed a preference for the null pronoun in both topic-shift and topic-continuity contexts, while 8–10-year-olds, like adults, preferred hura in topic-shift contexts and null pronouns in topic-continuity contexts. However, no developmental shift was observed in the preference for bera (Experiment 2): unlike adults, neither 6–7 nor 8–10-year-old children selected bera over null pronouns in topic-shift contexts. They instead showed a general preference for null pronouns, an indication of tolerance for ambiguity – a pattern which differs from prior studies in other null-subject languages, where ambiguous pronouns declined with age. The results reveal a different developmental pattern for hura and bera, which may be explained by the more rigid (syntactic) constraints operating on hura in comparison to bera in antecedent choice.