Abstract
It has been proposed that children learning English place a linear order restriction on anaphoric reference, blocking coreference between an NP and a proform that precedes it. In this paper I evaluate this proposed restriction and suggest that children’s avoidance of backward anaphora may not reflect an absolute restriction in the early stages of development, but rather may reflect a performance preference — that is, the child’s preference for one of a number of options made available in his competence grammar.
The experiments reported here were carried out in 1979–80 and the results presented at the 55th Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, San Antonio, Texas, December 1980. This paper is a revised and expanded version of that presentation. I have not attempted to discuss all the pertinent theoretical and experimental work reported since this work was done, some of which appears in this collection. I am grateful to Guy Carden, Jennifer Hsu, Barbara Lust, Armin Mester, Tom Roeper, Marilyn Shatz, Larry Solan and Susan Tavakolian for discussions and comments. The preparation of this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Graduate School Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Goodluck, H. (1987). Children’s Interpretation of Pronouns and Null NPs: An Alternative View. In: Lust, B. (eds) Studies in the Acquisition of Anaphora. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3387-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3387-3_11
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