This study investigates pronoun reference and verbs with nonactive morphology in high-functioning Greek-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). It is motivated by problems with reflexive pronouns demonstrated by English-speaking children with ASD and the fact that reflexivity is also expressed via nonactive (reflexive) verbs in…

The "Given-before-New" principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organized in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977; Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organize information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the…

This study investigates whether distinct neurodevelopmental disorders show distinct patterns of impairments in particular grammatical abilities and the relation of those grammatical patterns to general language delays and intellectual disabilities. We studied two disorders (autism and Williams syndrome [WS]) and two distinct properties (Principle…

In French, the acquisition of object clitics seems delayed, and omissions are documented. In this article, we look at the experimental paradigm traditionally used to elicit object clitics and propose a new elicitation procedure that is closer to how clitics are produced in spontaneous production. We show that under the proposed new experiment, the…

In order to interpret a sentence, hearers must often access information that is not explicitly stated, drawing on pragmatic knowledge and/or the discourse context. A problem with previous work on the acquisition of English focus particles such as "only," "also," "even," etc. is that it has often ignored such factors. Using a context-based…

In this study, the author investigates the telic/atelic distinction in adult and child Hebrew. Telicity is defined here in terms of culmination requirements, whereby telic predicates, but not atelic ones, have an inherent culmination point that must be reached in order for the predicate to be true. Motivated by a modular model of language, in…

We argue that the debate over the delay of Principle B effects needs to include an additional class of contexts: Evans-style or Exceptional Coreference contexts (ECCs) (e.g., "It's not true that no one voted for John. John[subscript 1] voted for him[subscript 1]"). Our experiment compares acquisition of regular Principle B contexts (B-contexts)…

Though preschoolers in certain experimental contexts strongly prefer to interpret ambiguous sentences containing quantified NPs and negation on the basis of surface syntax (e.g., Musolino's 1998 "observation of isomorphism"), contextual manipulations can lead to more adult-like behavior. But is isomorphism a "purely" pragmatic phenomenon, as…

This study investigates the acquisition of the discourse/pragmatic notion of topic, based on an experimental task eliciting topic vs. focus subjects. In spoken French, these are obligatorily realized as dislocated vs. nondislocated noun phrases. The results provide overwhelming evidence for the early mastery of topic, even by the youngest children…

Much developmental work has been devoted to "scalar implicatures." These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how "Some" pragmatically implies "Not all") that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded meaning of these terms (wherein…

It is well known that English and Dutch children often allow pronouns to refer to local ccommanding antecedents, the so-called Principle B Delay. A similar observation has been made for English agrammatics. This phenomenon, which we call the Pronoun Interpretation Problem (PIP), has been argued to be due to children's and agrammatics' difficulties…

Presents evidence for a theory that children learning Russian at a certain age know a syntactic principle that governs the distribution of pronouns, but that they do not know a pragmatic or semantic principle that restricts the situations in which noun phrases may be contraindexed. (Contains 48 references.) (JP)

Studied interpretation of local anaphor "sjalfan sig," the long-distance anaphor "sig," and pronouns in 55 Icelandic-speaking children and 10 adult controls. Results support an approach to binding that distinguishes the syntactic use of sig from its logophoric use and treats sig as a pronominal both in its internal structure and with regard to…