Towards a psychological basis for a theory of anaphora - Centre for ...

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suggests that five year-olds also have problems with pronoun anaphors in the comprehension of utterances. The experiment used stimuli of the following sort: 1) Jan was trying to catch some butterflies 2al The butterflies had beautiful wints (wings) and... 2b) They had beautiful wints (wings) and.. . The children heard short texts, containing these two-sentence pairs - i.e. (1) followtd by either (2a) or (2b) - and their task was to press a response key whenever they heard a "mispronounced" word. In the example here, the word "wings" is mispronounced as "wints" (the actual experiment was run in Dutch, and the above example is a loose translation of one of the stimulus sets). Earlier experiments by Cole and Jakimik (1980) had used this task successfully with first-grade children. The reason for using the mispronunciation detection task here was that reaction-times in this task are facilitated when the original word - the source for the mispronounced word - is more contextually predictable. To determine that a word has been mispronounced, one needs to establish what the source word was, and this process is apparently facilitated when the contextual constraints on the source word are stronger. In the present example, the word "wings" (the source for "wints") is only predictable if one knows that it is "butterflies" that are the subject of the sentence. But in sentences like (2b) one can only know this if one has established that the antecedent of "They" is indeed "butterflies". Thus, if there are any developmental differences in childrens' ability to resolve pronoun anaphors on-line, then this should produce a slower response in (2b) relative to (2a), where "butterflies" are explicitly mentioned in the sentence. Table 2 Mean Mispronunciation Detection Latencies (msec) Continuation Type Age-qroup Nounphrase Pronoun Diff. 5 Years 709 769 60' 7 Years 560 561 1 10 Years 495 500 ........................................................ 5 The results are given in Table 2, for the three age-groups we tested. The seven and the ten year-old groups show no differences between the pronoun and the
full nounphrase case, whereas the five year-olds are significantly slower in the pronoun case (note that the absolute differences in reaction-time between age-groups are not important here; what matters are the relative differences between the two continuation types) . This means that the predictability of "wings" - the source for "wints" - was the same for the older children independent of whether the continuation had an anaphor ic repeated noun or an anaphoric pronoun in subject posi tion, The anaphoric pronoun was apparently functioning to bring the properties of its antecedent into play in the subsequent processing of the utterance. The five year-olds, in contrast, did not seem to be able to benefit to the same extant from the presence of the pronoun. This suggests that children of this age have not yet fully developed the processing ski 11s needed to exploit properly the information carr i2d by the lexical properties of a pronoun. We now have in progress further exper Ilnents, investigating in more detail just what the problem is here for the five year-olds. But in an earlier experiment with five year-olds, using the monitoring task mentioned in section 2 above, we found the same pattern of immediate discourse mapping early in the sentence as we did for adults (Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 1980). This shows that young children, just as much as adults, are conducting their on-line analysis of an utterance within the framework of its discourse context, Thus their problems in the present experiment are unlikely to be caused by some general failure to relate utterances adequately to the context in which they are being heard (see also Tyler 61 Marslen-Wilson, 1978). WO suggost instood - and this is consistent with Karmiloff-Smith's an~lysds OE hor resultu - that young chi ldrcns' construction of a d iscourse-level Intarprot:~tlon oC RI) uttor011c~ 18 pr ltnar lly guided by prcqqm,7tlc and tnE~r~ntia1 proceAnnn, and that thorn ifl n devaLopnenta1 Iag in the ability to use other cues for discourse inapplng. The present resulta, together with fhose of WarmiloEf-$~~ith'e (sea also Karmllatf-smith, 1979), suggest that there are at least two components to this lag. The first involves the child's sensitivity to constraints on pronominalisation provided by the structure of the discourse. Karmiloff-Smith shows, for example, that five year-olds regularly fail to observe what she calls the "thematic subject" constraint on pronominalisation when they produce a discourse. This implies that they should also have difficulties in making use of discourse conffgurationai constraints in the comprehension of pronouns. The present experiment does not bear directly on this claim, since it did not involve strong discourse constraints - in the example given above, both 'Jan" and
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