TY - JOUR
T1 - A Comparison of Pronouns and Anaphors in Italian and English Acquisition
AU - McKee, Cecile
N1 - Funding Information:
My thanks to Stephen Crain and Howard Lasnik, who helped me with the parts of this work included in my dissertation. I am also grateful to Maria Emiliani, Merrill Garrett, Dana McDaniel, Lynne Roberts, Ana Varela, and several preschools in Parma and Tucson. Italian data were gathered with the support of a Fulbright fellowship. English data were gathered and this article was written while I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Cognitive Science Program and the Child Language Lab, both at the University of Arizona.
PY - 1992/1/1
Y1 - 1992/1/1
N2 - This study compares four experiments on the acquisition of binding, two conducted with Italian-speaking children and two with English-speaking children. The task used in these experiments was the truth value judgment task, which I argue permits fairly direct access to children's syntactic competence. The results from these experiments suggest that Italian-speaking children do abide by Binding Conditions A and B. But some explanation must be given for the finding that English-speaking children's mastery of pronominal binding lags behind their mastery of binding for anaphors and Rexpressions. Emphasizing that the explanation must (at least be able to) account for such cross-linguistic differences, I argue against appeals to maturation or to the learning of pragmatic constraints. I also consider proposals that can accommodate the cross-linguistic differences, namely a lexical misclassification proposal and Varela's (1989) suggestion about children's early hypotheses of governing category.
AB - This study compares four experiments on the acquisition of binding, two conducted with Italian-speaking children and two with English-speaking children. The task used in these experiments was the truth value judgment task, which I argue permits fairly direct access to children's syntactic competence. The results from these experiments suggest that Italian-speaking children do abide by Binding Conditions A and B. But some explanation must be given for the finding that English-speaking children's mastery of pronominal binding lags behind their mastery of binding for anaphors and Rexpressions. Emphasizing that the explanation must (at least be able to) account for such cross-linguistic differences, I argue against appeals to maturation or to the learning of pragmatic constraints. I also consider proposals that can accommodate the cross-linguistic differences, namely a lexical misclassification proposal and Varela's (1989) suggestion about children's early hypotheses of governing category.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=3142780030&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=3142780030&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1207/s15327817la0201_2
DO - 10.1207/s15327817la0201_2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:3142780030
SN - 1048-9223
VL - 2
SP - 21
EP - 54
JO - Language Acquisition
JF - Language Acquisition
IS - 1
ER -