Children's understanding of pronouns that differ in scope of reference

Abstract

AbstractSome pronouns can refer to entities that vary widely in scope. In some cases, the referent might be a noun phrase, and in other cases it might be a whole proposition. In the cases of pronouns with a noun phrase antecedent, an already existing referent is reactivated from the preceding context. In the case of pronouns with a propositional antecedent, the referent must be reformulated. The interpretation and use of such pronouns was investigated in 150 eight-year-old children in a reading comprehension task. Experiment 1 used a referent specification task and Experiment 2 used a completion task. It was more difficult for children to process a pronoun when its antecedent was a proposition compared to a noun phrase. These results are in line with the linguistic approaches (e.g., Gundel et al., 2005) according to which processing of pronouns with a propositional antecedent is more complex and requires greater cognitive effort.