Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns

• Published in: Lingua Vol. 117; no. 11; pp. 1959 - 1987
• Main Authors: Song, Hyun-joo, Fisher, Cynthia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.11.2007
• Subjects: Discourse processing; Discourse prominence; Discourse Structure; Foregrounding; Incremental processing; Language Acquisition; Preschool Children; Pronouns; Semantic Processing; Semantics Discourse Relationship; Pronouns; Language acquisition; Discourse prominence; Incremental processing; Discourse processing

Three experiments examined 2.5-year-olds’ sensitivity to discourse structure in pronoun interpretation. Children heard simple two-character stories illustrated by pictures on two video screens. In Experiments 1 and 2, one character in each story was established as more prominent than the other in se...