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

"the butterflies" could equally well have been
pronominalised. What the experiment appears to reflect
instead is a second type of difficulty for young
children - namely, in exploiting the information carried
by the lexical proper ties of an anaphor ic pronoun.
Karmilofi-Smith (1979) has reported related effects in
an experiment on story comprehension in children aged
between four and ten years. She used, for example, a
story about a child who took the only apple from a bowl
of fruit. In this story the information that there was
just one apple was carried solely by the (lexical)
contrast between the definite and the indefinite
article. Up until the age of about eight, the children
typically failed to draw the proper implications from
this lexical cue. When asked, at the end of the story,'
how many apples were left in the bowl, they would tend
to reply that there were several. They justified this
claim on the basis of their knowledge of normal
situations in the world - bowls of fruit usually have
lots of apples in them, and so on. Since these were
children who could correctly interpret a definite
article when heard in an isolated sentence ,
Karmiloff-Smith
argues that their failure to do so in a
story context reflects the dominance oE pragmatic
variables in their interpretation of a story.
These two areas of difficulty - with the lexical
and the configurational properties of pronoun anaphors -
suggest that, for the five year old, the presence of a
pronoun in an utterance may do little mare than to
indicate that something or someone that has already been
mentioned will now be talked about again. Determining
exactly what is now being talked about will then depend
on pragmatic inferences based on what is sald elsewhere
in kho ntr ln~j. CC 1;11Itl viow of l cl~vt,lop~nonI;nL
sequence is correct, than It in cartnlnly cenal~tont
~ l t h an emphasis on the dominant rolo of prnq~natic
It1 Crr ra11r:e 11r a Itrl:d rpta (,nLfol\ u C nr\nplru wu, 'i't r a
additional discaursa processing skills that doveliap
later in childhood shsu3d Iher~fore be seen ss a aort of
overlay an a primary process that operates in terms of
the plausibility of antecedent assignments in a given
discourse context.
4.3. The third experiment [g] represents an attempt
to track the precise time-course of the mapping
processes involved in the resolution of an anaphoric
pronoun. We were hoping to pinpoint the particular
instant at which, as it were, an anaphoric pronoun homed
in on its antecedent. In the light of the other
experiments we have described, and of the results we
w i l l now present, this enterprise was based on too
simple a conception of the anaphor resolution process.