engleski

Acquisition of pronoun anaphoric expressions in a pro-drop language

In early child language the use of pronouns is deictic. The use of pronouns bound to their antecedents implies child's ability to use more complex syntactic expressions marking child's language development on a sentence and discourse level. In Croatian, as a pro-drop (or a null-subject) language, the pronoun can be omitted leaving only morphological marking for person, gender, case on other constituents. The easier the anaphora resolution is, the more probably the pronoun omission will occur. On the other hand, contextual cues, cognitive status constraints (Gundel et al., 1993) in a conversational situation also play a role in identifying the right anaphora reference. The aim of this study is to show a developmental change in the children’s reliance on contextual or syntactic/pragmatic hierarchies. To this aim an eye-tracking experiment has been devised employing a visual world paradigm. Pictures with and without contextual cues have been presented accompanied by the sentences containing anaphoric expressions with the overt pronoun or with the pronoun dropped. All combinations (2x2) were presented to a group of children (pre-school and first-graders) and a group of adults (age 20-45). The differences in the gaze orientation at the specific moment (Just and Carpenter, 1980) reveal different anaphora resolution strategies, i.e. the reliance on different cues. While children rely more on the context, the adults shift reference mainly due to the violation of the "syntactic" hierarchy (overt pronoun where the null-subject is expected, results in the reference resolution shifted to the object). Therefore, not only that a single account of anaphora resolution does not explain all expression possibilities in a given language, but these accounts may be subject to developmental changes from childhood to adulthood.

Anaphora resolution ; Developmental changes ; Eye-tracking ; Visual world paradigm

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