Traditional language acquisition research that employs offline tasks, such as act-out, pointing, sentence-picture matching, truth-value and grammaticality judgments, has established that children up to the age of 6 make mistakes in the comprehension of anaphoric expressions. With the adaptation of the Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm (VWP) for language acquisition, it has become possible to investigate the interpretation of anaphoric expressions in children in real time to gain a better understanding of the development of pronominal reference. This chapter provides an overview of the VWP studies of 3- to 9-year-old children’s comprehension of reflexives and personal pronouns in terms of various linguistic constraints and their interaction. There is a developmental trajectory of such constraints, with morphological (gender) and lexico-semantic (verb transitivity) constraints being acquired first, followed by syntactic constraints (Principles A and B of the Binding Theory). Discourse-level constraints, such as information structure and order-of-mention, develop last and often need to be present in combination for children to apply them online.
(2005) Binding Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clackson, K., Felser, C., & Clahsen, H
(2011) Children’s processing of pronouns and reflexives in English: Evidence from eye-movements during listening. Journal of Memory and Language, 65(2), 128–144.
(2007) Eye tracking methodology: Theory and practice. Dordrecht: Springer.
Engelen, J.A.A., Bouwmeester, S., de Bruin, A.B.H., & Zwaan, R.A
(2014) Eye movements reveal differences in children’s referential processing during narrative comprehension. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 118, 57–77.
Epley, N., Morewedge, C.K., & Keysar, B
(2004) Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(6), 760–768.
Fernald, A., Zangl, R., Portillo, A.L., & Marchman, V.A
Gillette, J., Gleitman, H., Gleitman, L., & Lederer, A
(1999) Human simulation of vocabulary learning. Cognition, 73(2), 135–176.
Guasti, M.T
(2004) Language acquisition: The growth of grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hartshorne, J.K., Nappa, R., & Snedeker, J
(2014) Development of the first-mention bias. Journal of Child Language, 42(2), 423–446.
Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R.M
(1996) The Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm: A window into emerging language comprehension. In D. McDaniel, C. McKee, & H.S. Cairns (Eds.), Methods for assessing children’s syntax (pp. 105–124). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hoff, E
(Ed.) (2011) Research methods in child language: A practical guide. Malden, MA: Wiley.
Hollebrandse, B., Hendriks, P., & van Rij, J
(2012) Eye gaze patterns reveal subtle discourse effects on object pronoun resolution. Poster presented at the 35 GLOW Workshop, The Timing of Grammar. University of Potsdam, Germany.
Houston-Price, C
(2014) Head-Turning Preference / Preferential Looking Paradigm. In P.J. Brooks & V. Kempe (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Huettig, F., Rommers, J., & Meyer, A
(2011) Using the visual world paradigm to study language processing: A review and critical evaluation. Acta Psychologica, 137(2), 151–171.
(2014) Information structure cues for 4-year-olds and adults: Tracking eye movements to visually presented anaphoric referents. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(7), 877-892.
Kehler, A
(2002) Coreference, reference, and the theory of grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
(Eds.) (1996) Methods for assessing children’s syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Nadig, A.S., & Sedivy, J.C
(2002) Evidence of perspective-taking constraints in children’s on-line reference resolution. Psychological Science, 13(4), 329–336.
Nilsen, E.S., & Graham, S.A
(2012) The development of preschoolers’ appreciation of communicative ambiguity. Child Development, 83(4), 1400–1415.
O’Grady, W., Suguzi, T., & Yoshinaga, N
(2010) Quantifier spreading: Evidence from Japanese. Language Learning and Development, 6(2), 116–125.
Perovic, A., Modyanova, N., & Wexler, K
(2013) Comprehension of reflexive and personal pronouns in children with autism: A syntactic or pragmatic deficit?Applied Psycholinguistics, 34, 813–835.
Pyykkönen, P., Matthews, D., & Järvikivi, J
(2010) Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension: A visual world study of pronoun resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(1), 115–129.
(2014) Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm. In P.J. Brooks & V. Kempe (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language development (pp. 657–658). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
(2011) Studying language processing using eye movements. In E. Hoff (Ed.), Research methods in child language: A practical guide (pp. 177–190). Malden, MA: Wiley.
Trueswell, J.C., & Gleitman, L
(2004) Children’s eye movements during listening: Developmental evidence for a constraint-based theory of sentence processing. In J.M. Henderson & F. Ferreira (Eds.), The interface of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world (pp. 319–346). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I.A., Hill, N., & Logrip, M
(1999) The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73)2), 89–134.
Trueswell, J.C., & Tanenhaus, M.K
(Eds.) (2004) Approaches to studying word-situated language use. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
HAENDLER, Yair & Flavia ADANI
2018. Testing the effect of an arbitrary subject pronoun on relative clause comprehension: a study with Hebrew-speaking children. Journal of Child Language 45:4 ► pp. 959 ff.
Kesselová, Jana
2018. Self-reference in early speech of children speaking Slovak. Journal of Language and Cultural Education 6:2 ► pp. 14 ff.
Lehmkuhle, Ina & Sarah Schimke
2024. Are preschool children sensitive to the function of accessibility markers? A visual world study with German-speaking three- to four-year-olds. Linguistics Vanguard 9:1 ► pp. 139 ff.
SKARABELA, BARBORA & MITSUHIKO OTA
2017. Two-year-olds but not younger children comprehend it in ambiguous contexts: Evidence from preferential looking. Journal of Child Language 44:1 ► pp. 255 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.