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Control and coreference in early child language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Jennifer Ryan Hsu,
Helen Smith Cairns,
Sarita Eisenberg and
Gloria Schlisselberg
Jennifer Ryan Hsu*
Affiliation:
The William Pater son College of New Jersey
Helen Smith Cairns
Affiliation:
Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Sarita Eisenberg
Affiliation:
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Gloria Schlisselberg
Affiliation:
Hofstra University
*
Department of Communication Disorders, the William Paterson College of New Jersey, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ 07470, USA.
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Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between control and coreference using an act-out task involving 81 children ranging in age from 3;1 to 8;0 and eight adults ranging in age from 30 to 55. The results replicated previous findings in revealing five developmental stages in children's interpretation of PRO, an empty pronominal element. A significant relationship was observed in the patterns of children's interpretation of forwards sentences containing PRO and those containing overt pronouns. However, there was no relationship in the development of restrictions on control and restrictions on coreference.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , October 1989, pp. 599 - 622
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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Footnotes

*

We are grateful to Mrs Lenore Rappaport, Director of the Bayside Kindergarten and Nursery School in Bayside, New York, for granting us permission to interview the children in her school. We are also grateful to the Directors of the Big Apple school in Brooklyn, New York; the Glen Ridge Elementary school in Glen Ridge, New Jersey; and the Montclair Montessori School in Upper Montclair, New Jersey for permitting us to interview children attending their schools. We thank the parents, teachers and children from all of the schools for their cooperation. We are very grateful to Vivian Hsu and Tom Maxfield for developing the computer program used to generate unique sets of randomly ordered experimental sentences for each subject. Additional thanks to Tom for his help in designing our study. We are indebted to Dr Dana McDaniel for her assistance in some of the data collection and her comments on the manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank Dr Louis Hsu for his advice concerning the statistical analyses of our data. All mistakes, of course, are our own.

References

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