On the Asymmetrical Difficulty of Acquiring Person Reference in French: Production Versus Comprehension

Young French children freely produce subject pronouns by the age of 2. However, by age 2 and a half they fail to interpret 3rd person pronouns in an experimental setting designed to select a referent among three participants (speaker, hearer, and other). No such problems are found with 1st and 2nd p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of logic, language, and information Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 7 - 30
Main Authors Legendre, Géraldine, Smolensky, Paul
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer 01.01.2012
Springer Netherlands
Subjects
Adults
Children
Education
First language acquisition
Grammar
Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet)
Language comprehension
Logic
Older adults
Personal pronouns
Philosophy
Presuppositions
Pronouns
Referents
Semantics
Computing over alternatives
Personal pronouns
French
Bidirectional OT
Constraint ranking
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Summary:Young French children freely produce subject pronouns by the age of 2. However, by age 2 and a half they fail to interpret 3rd person pronouns in an experimental setting designed to select a referent among three participants (speaker, hearer, and other). No such problems are found with 1st and 2nd person pronouns. We formalize our analysis of these empirical results in terms of direction-sensitive optimizations, showing that uni-directionality of optimization, when combined with non-adult-like constraint rankings, explains the general acquisition pattern of 3rd person pronouns. Building on a specific analysis of assigning 3rd person reference by computing over alternatives (Heim 1991), we show that adult interpretation does not require bidirectional OT although it is fully compatible with it. What matters for comprehension in the domain investigated here is constraint ranking.
ISSN:0925-8531
1572-9583
DOI:10.1007/s10849-011-9150-0