Pronoun and Reflexive Comprehension Errors: A Study on Dutch and English L1 Acquisition.
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2015-06-11
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en
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This paper investigates the differences between the pronoun and reflexive comprehension patterns of Dutch and English speaking children. 20 Dutch (6;5-7;6) and 20 English children (6;5-7;7) were tested on their comprehension pattern of bi-clausal sentences with either a noun phrase (NP) or a quantified noun phrase (QP) as the subject of the embedded clause and a pronoun or reflexive in object position. Dutch children and English children both showed the classical delay of principle B test results and in concordance with many earlier studies (e.g. van Koert et al. 2014) presented two differences between comprehension pattern of English and Dutch children. One of these results is that English children as opposed to Dutch children perform less target-like when they encounter a local QP subject and a reflexive in a test item, while Dutch children perform less target-like when they encounter a QP subject and a pronoun in a t! est item. This study provides evidence for the hypothesis by van Koert et al. (2014), which explains the differences between Dutch and English comprehension patterns, by showing that English children have a collective reading preference for their quantifier, which prohibits them from locally binding their reflexive and allows them to use an emphatic pronoun interpretation allowing co-identification between the reflexive and the main clause subject.
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Faculteit der Letteren