Focus effect unveils children’s local processing of pronouns and reflexives

ABSTRACT

Studies on young children’s comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more “intensive” process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like discourse context. This could explain why children experience more difficulties with pronouns than with reflexives. Using eye-tracking and a truth value judgement task, we investigated the effect of focus via it-clefts on the processing of reflexives and pronouns in German-speaking children and adults. We analyzed gaze data of two time segments: before and during the mention of the pronoun/reflexive. The cleft segment revealed similar processing of it-clefts in children and adults. In the subsequent reflexive/pronoun segment, clefts caused adults to pay overall more attention to the local referent, while children fixated the clefted non-local referent more. The difference in focus effect, that is, children attend the clefted referent more, while adults pay more attention to the non-clefted referent, helped uncover processing differences between children and adults. That is, unlike adults, children consider only the local discourse context during referential processing. We argue that these processing differences cause children’s interpretation difficulties. However, the offline data showed no effect of information structure, suggesting that whether the processing differences transfer to the final interpretation depends on the language-specific function of the pronoun system, which may aid in restricting referential links.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Kristin Sudu for drawing the pictures, Bettina Braun and Esther Ruigendijk for lending us their lab spaces for data collection. A special thanks goes to the children, caregivers, and parents of the Kindergartens in Lauenbrück and Konstanz.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available at https://t.ly/jUOus.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Note that Rule I does not only accommodate Principle B, but also Principle C, and therefore applies to pronouns and noun phrases.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2017-0692].