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Abstract

Three-, four-, and five-year-old children listened to stories about which they were asked questions requiring resolution of the proper reference of he. The 5-year-olds performed at higher levels of accuracy than the other two subject groups. The 4-year-olds were dis tinguishable from the 3-year-olds primarily in terms of the pronominal reference resolution strategies reflected in their errors. These included searching only prior portions of text for plausible referents, and selecting referents that had appeared most frequently in the story. Of the four reference conditions employed, within-sentence anaphora proved to be the easiest type of reference to resolve, and within- sentence cataphora the most difficult. Anaphoric reference in which the appropriate referent preceded the pronoun by one or three sentences in text was associated with intermediate levels of accuracy.

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Children's resolution of pronominal reference in text

Abstract

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