Can Toddy Give Me an Orange? Parent Input and Young Children's Production of I and You

Abstract

Learning personal pronouns is a challenging linguistic task because children must adopt words for self- and other-reference that parents use for other- and self-reference, respectively. We examined person-reference in action contexts by 11 first–born children and their parents from the CHILDES database, coding the extent to which parents mixed first- and second-person pronouns with third-person names as well as their children's production of I, you, and other self- and other-referring words. Children whose parents produced a mix of pronouns and names for self- and other-reference (i.e., I, me, my, and Mommy; you and child name) acquired I and you more readily compared with children whose parents mixed pronouns and names only for self-reference and children whose parents produced only I and you. Moreover, children in the latter two groups were more likely to spontaneously introduce forms other than I and you for self- and other-reference. We conclude that young children are conceptually prepared to acquire the conventional system of person-reference and that mixed input supports their learning of I and you.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are most grateful to the parents and children who generously contributed their time and to the researchers who painstakingly prepared transcripts for the CHILDES database. We wish to acknowledge Pomona College undergraduate research assistants Adam Conner-Simons, Sarah Davies, Diego Garcia, Damata Kaleem, Julia Longenecker, Sarah Lysogorski, Kelly Schwartz, and Jennifer Sweda and graduate assistants Linda Meyer, Julie Sokolsky, and Emily Kates for their careful and dedicated work during various stages of data collection and analysis. Many thanks also to Judith Goodman and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

¹We did not examine parent use of your because it is not a term that children of this age employ to refer to other people.