Pronouns are words like ‘he’ or ‘she’ that
can take the place of a noun in a sentence. So instead of saying, The girl hits the ball, we can say, She hits the ball. Confusion sometimes
occurs when there is more than one noun or pronoun in a sentence. For example,
in the sentence, The girl splashed her,
it may not be clear to the listener if the ‘her’ refers to ‘the girl’ or
someone else. Some pronouns, however, provide more clues about how to connect
information. In the sentence, The girl
splashed herself, the pronoun, ‘herself’ (called a reflexive pronoun) tells
the listener that the girl is splashing her own self. The researchers in this
study were interested in whether or not children with and without a
developmental language impairment (DLD; also known as specific language
impairment) use the same principles for binding information with appropriate
pronouns.
The researchers collected data from 46 school
age children: 22 with DLD, and 24 with typically developing language. The
children first heard three versions of a sentence in which there was either a
pronoun, a reflexive, or a noun: The alligator
knows that the leopard with the green eyes is patting him/himself/the girl
on the head with a soft pillow. At the option
point in the sentence, the children were presented with a picture of the actor
coming just before (i.e., LEOPARD in the example sentence), and asked to decide
if it was something that could be alive or not. Compared to the responses to
the noun (i.e., ‘the girl’), slower responses were expected for the pronoun
(‘him’) than the reflexive (‘himself’) because the reflexive pronoun activates
binding with the actor. The results indicate that in general, the children with DLD were slower
at responding to the picture, but showed the same response patterns as the
typically developing group.
The results of this study add to the growing
evidence that children with DLD show typical patterns of language development.
The authors speculated that the overall slower responses of children with DLD
in sentence processing tasks could reflect interference within working memory.
Blogger:
Ren Lohmann is an MA student in Linguistics, supervised by Dr. Lisa Archibald.
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