The Development of NP Selection in School-Age Children: Reference and Spanish Subject Pronouns

Abstract

Abstract To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the stories, overt pronouns in same-reference were redundant, and null pronouns in switch-reference rendered reference ambiguous. Adult participants preferred null pronouns in same-reference contexts and overt pronouns in switch-reference contexts, demonstrating an avoidance of redundancy and ambiguity. Children demonstrated a tolerance for redundancy well into adolescence. A tolerance for ambiguous reference declined at age eight/nine and then progressively decreased with age. We interpret the tolerance for ambiguity as an indication that children have difficulty with perspective taking when faced with complex structures and tasks. Notes 1In this article, we will use the term 'null' to refer to omitted arguments since there is evidence that linguistic gaps are psychologically real, phonetically empty categories (CitationMcElree & Bever 1989). This is likely to be true even in child language, since at the earliest stages of language production children appear to know whether or not their language allows null subjects or not (CitationValian 1991; CitationValian & Eisenberg 1996; CitationGrinstead 2004). 2Other important linguistic variables that influence Spanish subject pronoun expression include person/number; tense/mood/aspect; lexical content of the verb; clause type (CitationOtheguy, Zentella & Livert 2007; CitationOtheguy & Zentella 2012); and priming (CitationCameron & Flores-Ferrán 2004; CitationTravis 2007; CitationTorres Cacoullos & Travis 2010). 3Ortiz López's (2010) study includes both monolinguals and bilinguals interviewed in the region of the Dominican Republic near the Haitian border. Here we only include his analyses of monolingual Dominican Spanish. 4The adults in Los Angeles are Silva-Corvalán's (1994:15,160) 'Group 1' speakers, who immigrated to the US after age 11. 5Contexts in which either an overt or a null subject pronoun is required are excluded from analyses in studies that examine variable pronoun expression (for a discussion of excluded contexts see CitationOtheguy & Zentella 2012, Chapter 3). 6Reference remains a predictor of bilingual adults' pronoun use, even though bilinguals are somewhat less sensitive to Reference than monolinguals (CitationMontrul 2004; CitationToribio 2004; CitationOrtiz López 2009; CitationShin & Otheguy 2009). 7The experimental studies discussed here have focused on testing Carminati's (2002) Position of the Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH), which proposes that null subject pronouns preferably refer to an antecedent in the specifier position of an inflectional phrase (Spec. IP), whereas overt subject pronouns preferably refer to an antecedent in a lower syntactic position, such as the complement of the verb. 8Ortiz López's (2011:423) study of Spanish in contact with Haitian Creole included other participants, but the relevant ones for the current paper are the monolingual Spanish-speaking children. 9Ortiz López (2011:437) reports a surprising pattern, whereby four-year-old monolingual children produced very high rates of overt pronouns (81% overt), but five- and six-year-olds produced comparatively low rates (26%). It is unclear why this pattern emerged. Since the study included all grammatical persons, it is possible that the young children primarily produced first-person singular contexts. Given the small number of monolingual children included in the study (seven children, ranging in age from 4- to 12-years-old), further investigation is warranted. It would be particularly fruitful to investigate differences between Dominican and Mexican children with respect to subject pronoun use, since there is evidence that Spanish spoken by Dominican adults is in some ways more similar to non-pro-drop languages (CitationToribio 2000). 10Spanish-speaking children were also included in this study, but they were bilingual (Spanish-Italian). 11Third-person inanimate pronouns appear earlier than third-person personal pronouns (CitationHarley & Ritter 2002:499–500). 12Several researchers have found that ambiguous verbal morphology does not result in more overt pronoun use (CitationBayley & Pease-Álvarez 1997:363–364; Orozco & Guy 2008:75; Abreu 2009:114–115). See Silva-Corvalán (2001:156–169) for an overview. Nevertheless, we chose to include only verbs with distinctive morphology for our experiment. 13All experimental items included characters of different genders. This was done so that reference to the dolls was always clear. 14Stress affects reference interpretation (CitationBaauw, Ruigendijk & Cuetos 2004). Since we wanted to know if the unstressed overt pronoun by itself is preferred for switch-reference, overt pronouns were unstressed in the stories. 15A total of 27 participants were excluded based on the criterion for employing a recency strategy. Almost all of the excluded participants were from the youngest age groups (14 first graders, 8 third graders, 4 fifth graders, and 1 ninth grader). 16Since some age groups did not contain an even amount of participants and some participants were excluded based on their recency strategy, not all age groups could be evenly divided into two participant groups. Note. **** p < .0001. 17Note that most of the studies of young children's overt versus null argument NPs juxtapose all overt NPs with null NPs, without distinguishing between types of overt NPs. 18Grodzinsky & Reinhart (1993:88) and Reinhart (2006:204-238) discuss the well-known studies of children's acceptance of coreference in sentences like Mama Bear washes her. CitationReinhart (2006) also includes other phenomena, such as main-stress shift, in her more general discussion of the processing cost of reference-set computation. 19Children between one and three years old learning Catalan, Italian, or Spanish produce overt third person demonstrative pronouns, such as este, 'this,' but not personal pronouns, él, ella, ellos, ellas 'he, she, they' (CitationBel 2003:16–17; Paradis & Navarro 2003:380; Serratrice 2005: 451–455; Austin et al. 2008:39) iNote that the Spanish singular possessive pronoun su is not marked for gender.