CHAPTER (2015). Online evidence for children's interpretation of personal pronouns

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Chapter 9

Online evidence for children’s interpretation of personal pronouns

Irina A. SekerinaCity University of New York

Traditional language acquisition research that employs offline tasks, such as act-out, pointing, sentence-picture matching, truth-value and grammaticality judgments, has established that children up to the age of 6 make mistakes in the comprehension of anaphoric expressions. With the adaptation of the Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm (VWP) for language acquisition, it has become possible to investigate the interpretation of anaphoric expressions in children in real time to gain a better understanding of the development of pronominal reference. This chapter provides an overview of the VWP studies of 3- to 9-year-old children’s comprehension of reflexives and personal pronouns in terms of various linguistic constraints and their interaction. There is a developmental trajectory of such constraints, with morphological (gender) and lexico-semantic (verb transitivity) constraints being acquired first, followed by syntactic con-straints (Principles A and B of the Binding Theory). Discourse-level constraints, such as information structure and order-of-mention, develop last and often need to be present in combination for children to apply them online.

Keywords: Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm (VWP), online, constraints, gender, verb transitivity, Binding Theory, order-of-mention, discourse, Dutch, German

1. Introduction

This chapter describes what is currently known about how young children inter-pret sentences with reflexives and personal pronouns, collectively referred to as anaphoric expressions, in real time. Studying online language comprehension in children has become possible with the development and recent adoption of the Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm (VWP; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 2004) in language acquisition research in general (Sedivy, 2010; Trueswell, 2008, 2011;

doi 10.1075/tilar.15.09sek© 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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214 Irina A. Sekerina

Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999), and in the acquisition of pronominal reference in particular (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2007; Bergmann, Paulus, & Fikkert, 2012; Clackson, Felser, & Clahsen, 2011; Engelen, Bouwmeester, de Bruin, & Zwaan, 2014; Hartshorne, Nappa, & Snedeker, 2014; Hollebrandse, Hendriks, & van Rij, 2012; Järvikivi, Pyykkönen-Klauck, Schimke, Colonna, & Hemforth, 2014; Pyykkönen, Matthews, & Järvikivi, 2010; Sekerina, Stromswold, & Hestvik, 2004; Song & Fisher, 2005, 2007).

Eye-tracking studies of online interpretation of anaphoric expressions by children that employ the Intermodal Preferential-Looking Paradigm (Song & Fisher, 2005, 2007), the Listening-While-Looking Paradigm (Fernald, Zangl, Portillo, & Marchman, 2008), the ‘Poor-Man’s’ Eye-Tracker (Clackson et al., 2011; Hartshorne et al., 2014; Pyykkönen et al., 2010; Snedeker & Thothathiri, 2008), and the adult version of the VWP (Arnold et al., 2007; Engelen et al., 2014; Järvikivi et al., 2014; Sekerina et al., 2004) are still relatively new. Nevertheless, the VWP is now widely accepted as a very promising technique to study children’s online language comprehension, as argued for in several overview chapters that have recently appeared in edited volumes on research methods in language acqui-sition (Blom & Unsworth, 2010; Hoff, 2011; Sedivy, 2010; Sekerina, Fernández, & Clahsen, 2008; Sekerina, 2014; Trueswell, 2008, 2011; Trueswell & Gleitman, 2004). In contrast to other online measures that can be pursued with children, such as reaction times, cross-modal priming (Clahsen, 2008; Marinis, 2010), and event-related brain potentials (Männel & Friederici, 2008; Rispens & Krikhaar, 2010), eye-tracking is more versatile, portable, and user-friendly, does not rely on the metalinguistic skills of participants, and can be used to successfully test infants as young as 7–9 months of age.

Generally speaking, eye movements reflect the tight coupling between lan-guage and referents present in the world. Therefore, they are especially well-suited for studying referential processing, i.e., how referents’ names – full noun phrases (e.g., the dog, a man, this cup) and anaphoric expressions in the form of reflexives (e.g., himself, herself) and personal pronouns (e.g., he, her, they) – are linked to the real-world entities they represent. The first VWP study of how 4- to 6-year-old children’s eye movements reflect their referential processing was published in 1999 (Trueswell et al., 1999). It revealed that approximately 300 ms after hearing a noun phrase in the spoken sentence, children shifted their gaze to the named entity in the visual scene. The first VWP experiment of interpretation of anaphoric expres-sions, namely, personal pronouns in adults, appeared in 2000 (Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2000), but it was not until 2004 that the first child eye-tracking experiment on the interpretation of reflexives and short-distance pronouns was published (Sekerina et al., 2004). Since then, research on referential processing in children using the VWP has expanded from isolated sentences and


Chapter 9. Online interpretation of pronouns 215

sentences in discourse to complex referential communication (Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004; Nadig & Sedivy, 2002; Nilsen & Graham, 2012).

In the present chapter, I will focus on the application of the VWP to inves-tigate how reflexives and personal pronouns are interpreted online by children between the ages of 3 and 9 years. First, I will provide the rationale for using the VWP with children (Section 2) and then describe questions that have been driving the research on acquisition of reflexives and personal pronouns, within the framework of generative grammar (Section 3). Next, I will review the pub-lished child eye-tracking studies conducted within the constraint-based frame-work (Trueswell & Gleitman, 2004). These constraints can be morphological (e.g., gender), syntactic (Principles A and B of the Binding Theory), semantic (e.g., verb transitivity), and discourse-related (e.g., order-of-mention) (Section 4). The con-cluding remarks are presented in the final section (Section 5).

2. The rationale for using the VWP to study pronoun interpretation in children

2.1 Why the Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm?

The classical empirical studies in the area of acquisition of anaphoric expressions (see Guasti, 2004, for an overview) have employed three well-established compre-hension tasks – picture selection, act-out, and truth-value judgments (McDaniel, McKee, & Cairns, 1996). These are well-known offline methods that measure chil-dren’s final interpretation of reflexives and pronouns at the end of the sentence and register their ultimate success or failure in comprehension (i.e., accuracy). However, there are two disadvantages of offline methods compared to online ones. First, accuracy measures may insufficiently tap into children’s level of abil-ities by underestimating their capacity. They may mask a possible dissociation in children’s interpretation of sentences with pronouns: producing an overt response as required by a controlled, offline task – picture selection, act-out, and truth- value judgments – may bear additional cognitive load in comparison to natural behavior such as looking around. Indeed, children’s interpretation of pronouns has been shown to vary dramatically depending on the task employed (Bergmann et al., 2012; O’Grady, Suguzi, & Yoshinaga, 2010; Sekerina et al., 2004). Finally, offline methods do not provide us with time course of how children arrive at the end- of- sentence interpretation of the pronoun (selection of the referent) when it is correct and, thus, preclude us from finding out what goes on when the child’s preferences and processing choices deviate from those of adults.



Bergmann and colleagues (2012, p. 779) describe the high variability in end-of-sentence offline accuracy scores, namely, 16%–82%, that they found in re-viewing a large number of published cross-linguistic studies on offline pronoun interpretation in children (see below for a discussion of this study). The authors suggest that this variability is most likely attributed to ‘experimental artifacts’ and stress the task impact on children’s end-of-sentence response in language acqui-sition studies. The importance of this methodological point, i.e., the necessity to combine offline and online measures to investigate how children interpret reflex-ives and pronouns, was originally proposed by our team (Sekerina et al., 2004), in the first published VWP experiment on processing of ambiguous short-dis-tance pronouns by 4- to 7-year-old children. We discovered that the children’s overwhelming preference to choose the sentence-internal referent for ambiguous pronouns in a pointing task contrasted with their eye movements that showed an emerging competition between the sentence-internal and -external referents. We concluded that, “Had we relied only on the picture selection task, […] we would not have discovered the striking discrepancy between how children resolve refer-ential ambiguity off-line and on-line” (Sekerina et al., 2004, p. 149).

Bergmann and colleagues (2012) provide a direct comparison of children’s interpretation of anaphoric expressions in offline picture selection and online looking-while-listening tasks by using the type of task as a within-participants independent variable: they had the same children perform the two tasks con-secutively. Two groups of Dutch-speaking children (22 three-year-olds and 16 four-year-olds) participated. First, the looking-while-listening task was admin-istered, followed by the picture selection task. Pictures of four puppet animals (see Figure 1) performing an action were arranged in pairs (e.g., a cat and a cow)

Figure 1. Bergmann et al. (2012). (Reprinted with permission from “Preschoolers’ comprehension of pronouns and reflexives: the impact of the task,” by C. Bergmann, M. Paulus, & P. Fikkert. From Journal of Child Language, 39(4), pp. 777–803, Fig. 2. Copyright © 2012 Cambridge University Press.)



and combined with the simultaneous auditory presentation of simple transitive sentences in Dutch.

The linguistic manipulations involved the use of either reflexive zich ‘self ’ or pronoun hem ‘him’ in the object position crossed with the type of verb (with the anaphoric expressions preceding the complex verbs with particles, or fol-lowing the simple form of the same verb in the progressive form). During the looking-while-listening task, children were presented with each of the 24 pairs of pictures and listened to them for 5 seconds as their eye movements were re-corded. After completing the eye-tracking experiment, they saw the same pairs of pictures on the plastic cards combined with the same auditory stimuli and had to point to the picture that matched the auditory stimulus.

The analysis of the results from the response-based offline picture selection task revealed the familiar pattern of differences in the interpretation of anaphor-ic expressions, with accuracy for the reflexives varying from 55% (3-year-olds) to 77% (4-year-olds) and, for the pronouns, remaining low and constant at 46% for both age groups. The significant interaction between the age and condition showed that while the accuracy of 4-year-olds was better (above chance) in the reflexive condition compared to the pronoun condition, no such difference was found for the 3-year-old group. Thus, Bergmann and colleagues established the trajectory of the ability to correctly interpret reflexives that emerges between 3 and 4 years of age. However, the accuracy of the interpretation of pronouns remained at chance level even at the age of four. In contrast, the analysis of the children’s eye-movement patterns demonstrated that despite their chance performance in the offline picture selection task, 4-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) started to look significantly more at the correct referent for the pronoun in the 500 ms window that followed its onset; no such increase in fixations to the referent was found in the baseline condition. The authors concluded that this dissociation between the results of the offline and online tasks in the same group of 4-year-olds occurred due to the increased demand of the response-based picture selection task in com-parison to the looking-while-listening task.

These two studies (Bergmann et al., 2012, and Sekerina et al., 2004; see also Clackson et al., 2011, Section 4.5 below) convincingly demonstrate that we need multiple measures to gain reliable data from accuracy and online measures for language acquisition studies. The detailed protocol of moment-by-moment con-struction of interpretation for anaphoric expressions provided by the VWP allows us to gain an insight into how linguistic (morphological, syntactic and semantic) and discourse-related (prominence, order-of-mention, etc.) constraints on inter-pretation of anaphoric expressions are used by young children in comprehension and establish the exact point in time when they apply them online.



2.2 Design of the VWP studies with children

Studying children’s language comprehension online is notoriously difficult, espe-cially when we try to ascertain dynamics of language development. Infants and toddlers cannot perform metalinguistic ‘direct action’ tasks required for acting out, sentence-picture verification, and truth-value judgments (Huettig, Rommers, & Meyer, 2011). To meet the challenge of studying pronominal reference online in very young children, developmental psycholinguists mostly rely on ‘look and listen’ tasks implemented via the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPLP) and Looking-While-Listening Paradigm.

Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1996) created the IPLP in 1981 to use with in-fants and toddlers between the ages of 4 months and 3.5 years. The IPLP is a version of the Preferential Looking Paradigm (Houston-Price, 2014) because it measures the infants’ allocation of visual attention based on which of two visual displays presented side-by-side they prefer to look at. The dependent variable is the fixation time in seconds that the infant spends viewing one of the two depict-ed events that matches the spoken input. Two IPLP studies that investigated the role of prominence constraints in interpretation of ambiguous pronouns by 2.5- and 3-year-old children were conducted by Song and Fisher (2005, 2007). Look-ing-While-Listening is a variant of the IPLP that focuses not on global measures of the total looking time to the matching video event, but on real-time measures of looking time as the infant switches her attention between the two monitors. The Looking-While-Listening method was pioneered by Anne Fernald and her colleagues (Fernald et al., 2008) at Stanford University and is intended for use with infants as young as 15 months of age. Pyykkönen and colleagues (Pyykkönen et al., 2010) used the Looking-While-Listening method to test the role of seman-tic factors in interpretation of reflexives and pronouns by 3-year-old children; it is described below in detail (Section 4.2).

Starting around the age of 4 years, it becomes possible to move from the ‘look and listen’ tasks to ‘direct action’ tasks in the VWP (Huettig et al., 2011); the lat-ter require children to act upon spoken instructions by pointing or clicking on a picture or moving an object. The ‘poor man’s’ eye-tracking version expands the forced-choice selection of the IPLP and Looking-While-Listening methods from two referents to four. Here, a child participant is seated in front of an apparatus that consists of a board raised in the back, with four quadrants (see Figure 2).

Each of the quadrants contains one referent in the form of a real-life object or toy. There is an opening in the middle of the board for a hidden digital video camera that is trained on the child’s face. Participants’ fixations on one of the four quadrants are determined by the direction of the eyes coded from the video tape



in a frame-by-frame manner, with a resolution of 33 to 40 ms, after the experi-ment is completed (see Snedeker & Thothathiri, 2008, pp. 145–147, for details). Children use the objects placed on the board to perform an act-out task as they listen to spoken instructions. It is possible to replace the board with a projection screen for picture presentation, with a video camera located below. A study by Clackson and colleagues (Clackson et al., 2011) that used the projection set-up and tested application of Principles A and B in the interpretation of anaphoric expressions by 6- to 9-year-old children is reviewed below (Section 4.3).

Finally, a full version of the VWP with adults appeared in psycholinguistics in 1995 (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995) and was suc-cessfully adapted for children later on (Trueswell et al., 1999). Instead of inferring children’s fixations to two or four quadrants based on the position of the eyes relative to the head as is done in the IPLP, Looking-While-Listening and ‘poor man’s’ eye-tracking, such ‘point of regard’ (POR) eye-trackers measure orienta-tion of the eyes in space in real time. They calculate fixations from a combina-tion of pupil and corneal reflections and allow for a highly precise pixel-by-pixel identification of what a participant is looking at, without restricting the number of referents (Duchowski, 2007). Both head-mounted (see Figure 3) and remote desktop and laptop (see Figure 4) configurations of POR eye-trackers produced by several manufacturing companies (e.g., Tobii, ISCAN, SMI, EyeLink) are used successfully with infants and older children.

Figure 2. A set-up for the ‘Poor Man’s’ eye-tracker. I thank Lucia Pozzan and John Trueswell for their permission to use this photograph.



Full-version child VWP experiments are very similar to the adult ones and are characterized by a ‘direct action’ task, rigorous within-participants design, Latin-square counterbalancing of items, and any number of referents. They use

Figure 3. Child head-mounted eye-tracker (ISCAN, Inc.).

Figure 4. Child remote desktop eye-tracker (ISCAN, Inc.).



a wide variety of experimental materials (toys, single images, multiple images, cartoons, animated images, and video clips), tasks (act-out, sentence-picture ver-ification, and sentence-picture matching), and measures (accuracy, RTs, latencies of saccades, coarse- and fine-grained eye movements).

Eight representative child studies that have employed the full version of the VWP to explore how children use morphological (Arnold et al., 2007; Hartshorne et al., 2014), syntactic (Clackson et al., 2011; Hollebrandse et al., 2012), discourse (Engelen et al., 2014; Sekerina et al., 2004), and information structure (Järvikivi et al., 2014; Pyykkönen et al., 2010) constraints in online interpretation of reflex-ives and pronouns are reviewed in Section 4.

3. Reflexives and pronouns in language acquisition research: Theoretical questions

The Government and Binding theory, developed within the framework of gener-ative grammar in the early 1980s, includes a set of three principles that regulate how anaphoric expressions select their reference. Two principles – Principles A and B – are the cornerstone of the Binding Theory (BT) that plays an important role in linguistics despite the numerous modifications it has undergone in the past 25 years. Conceptually, Principle A requires that reflexives and reciprocals select their referent locally (must be bound within their local domain) where-as Principle B states that personal (non-reflexive) pronouns must select their referent outside of the local domain (must be free within their local domain). Local domains are loosely equivalent to the domains of arguments (noun and prepositional phrases, and clauses) and are built on the structural notion of a hierarchical relationship (c-command) between the anaphoric expression and its antecedent. Both reflexives and personal pronouns, like all anaphoric expressions, identify their referent antecedent via the coreference process. The notation typical-ly makes use of indices, as is illustrated in examples (1) and (2) (see Büring, 2005, for a comprehensive introduction to the BT) (* represents unacceptable cases of coreference).

(1) Principle A (reflexives) a. John1 likes himself1. b. *John1 likes him1.

(2) Principle B (pronouns) a. *John1 thinks that Bill2 likes himself1. b. John1 thinks that Bill2 likes him1.



When there are two potential antecedents in the sentence, as in (2b), the one that c-commands the pronoun and obeys the locality restrictions of the BT is re-ferred to as the accessible antecedent (John) while the other (Bill) is the inaccessible antecedent.

An environment where the pronoun and its antecedent are both contained within a single utterance in isolation, as in (1) and (2), is quite rare. More typical-ly, coreference spans a few sentences in discourse; in such situations, resorting to syntactic restrictions such as local domain and c-command is not enough. There are also special cases of reference, such as disjoint, discourse, and accidental ref-erence, as well as short-distance pronouns, among others; to accommodate them, additional semantic and pragmatic constraints have been proposed to augment the classical syntactic BT.

Research on the acquisition of the structural constraints in the form of the BT principles by children emerged very quickly after they had been introduced in theoretical linguistics, and even now, 25 years later, this topic remains a cen-tral one in generative approaches to language acquisition (Perovic, Modyanova, & Wexler, 2013). Two main findings have emerged that characterize the development of comprehension of anaphoric expressions in children. First, it has been shown for many languages that reflexives whose distribution is governed by Principle A are successfully acquired by the age of 4 years. Second, in contrast to reflexives, children continue to make errors with the interpretation of third-person pro-nouns until after they turn 6: they often allow the pronoun to co-refer with the an-tecedent within the local domain in violation of Principle B, as if it were a reflexive. This latter phenomenon has received the name Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE). A number of influential accounts have been proposed to explain the DPBE (see Guasti, 2004, Chapter 8, and Chondrogianni, this volume, for discussion).

In the cross-linguistic comprehension studies of the DPBE that dominated the earlier research on acquisition of the BT in the 1980s–1990s, children were often presented with sentences in isolation. However, the referential interpreta-tion of pronouns often goes beyond the scope of a single sentence and requires establishing coreference with a referent that can be separated from the pronoun by a few sentences in discourse. For example, in a short discourse narrative (3), in order to successfully select a distant antecedent referent (e.g., the dog or the cat) for the pronoun he, children need to consider numerous morphological and syntactic constraints (i.e., gender, number, animacy, thematic roles) as well as dis-course factors (i.e., salience, order-of-mention, information status, and discourse relations).



(3) a. The dog and the cat wanted to wash the car together. b. The dog put a bucket of soapy water next to the cat near the front of the

car. c. Then he got out some sponges. d. And together they started washing the hood and the fenders.

In general, discourse prominence and salience, such as order-of-mention, first-mention bias, and repeated mention, are the main constraints that drive the interpretation of a pronoun in English when its antecedent is outside of the utter-ance (Kehler, 2002). Thus, the third-person pronoun he in (3c) prefers to co-refer with the most prominent and accessible antecedent, the subject of the second sentence (i.e., the dog).

The review of the published child VWP studies on online interpretation of pronouns presented below in Section 4 demonstrates that, although children follow some morphological (gender), semantic (verb transitivity) and discourse constraints (order-of-mention) (Arnold et al., 2007; Hartshorne et al., 2014; Pyykkönen et al., 2010), they often have difficulties with syntactic (Clackson et al., 2011; Hollebrandse et al., 2012), information structure (Järvikivi et al., 2014), and more complex constraints that operate in comprehension of longer discourse (Sekerina et al., 2004; Engelen et al., 2014).

4. Studies of children’s online interpretation of anaphoric expressions

The published VWP studies on online interpretation of anaphoric expressions by children vary in research questions, age of child participants, design, and tasks. Nevertheless, there is a theoretical approach that provides a unifying research agenda to investigate how children learn to interpret reflexives and pronouns. It is the Constraint-Based Theory of sentence processing (Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995) in conjunction with the Syntactic Bootstrapping Theory of language ac-quisition (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999; Trueswell & Gleitman, 2004). When applied to the acquisition of pronominal reference, it argues that children start to apply multiple constraints early when interpreting reflexives and pronouns. However, they weigh these constraints differently from adults, as they gradually add various sources of information resulting in an acquisition path of pronominal reference. This section reviews eight VWP studies on children’s on-line interpretation of reflexives and pronouns that examine an inventory of these constraints, how they are applied in real time, and attempt to identify how and when children start taking them into consideration on their way to adult-like pronominal reference.



4.1 Gender and order-of-mention constraints: 4- to 6-year-old children (Arnold et al., 2007; Hartshorne et al., 2014)

4.1.1 Arnold et al. (2007) Using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, Song and Fisher (2005, 2007) demonstrated that children as young as 3 years of age can successfully in-terpret ambiguous pronouns in a ‘look and listen’ task when the accessibility of the antecedent referent is made prominent by simultaneous use of multiple dis-course constraints (e.g., frequency of mention, subject status, first mention, and previous pronominalisation). Arnold and colleagues (2007) set out to investigate if just one of these constraints, order-of-mention instantiated in English as first- mention bias, is strong enough to guide older English-speaking children (4- to 5-year-olds) in selecting the correct antecedent. The second goal of their study was to explore the effect of gender, a strong morphological constraint. These two factors, the gender of the pronoun that matched one of the two referents and the order-of-mention of the target referent, were fully crossed in the experiment.

In the ‘direct action’ Experiment 1, the children performed an act-out task with three toys (two animate referents and an object) while the direction of their gaze was simultaneously recorded in the listening-while-looking set-up. The two animate referents were either of the same biological gender (e.g., Puppy and Panda Bear, both masculine) or different (e.g., Puppy, masculine, and Froggy, feminine), and the target referent was either first- or second-mentioned in (4a–b):

(4) a. Puppy is having lunch with Panda Bear. He wants some milk. b. Puppy is having lunch with Froggy. He/she wants some milk. c. Can you show me who wants the milk?

In their offline act-out response to the question (4c) (placing the toy milk car-ton in front of one of the two animate referents), children consistently chose the correct referent in the different-gender condition (4b), although younger chil-dren (3.5- to 4-year-olds) did so only when it was first-mentioned. However, in contrast to adults, neither of the age groups demonstrated a preference for the first- mentioned referent in the same-gender condition (e.g., Puppy in (4a)). For eye- movement analysis, the direction of the gaze to the referent was established from the close-up recording of the child’s face starting from the onset of the pro-noun for 3 seconds. There were no differences in the gaze patterns for any of the conditions for younger children as they consistently preferred to fixate on the second-mentioned character. Older children (4- to 5-year-olds) in the different- gender condition started fixating on the different gender referent from 600 to 800 ms after the onset of the pronoun. In the same-gender condition, they fixated on the referent they had chosen regardless of the order-of-mention.



Note, however, that the same-gender condition (4a) was always ambiguous, leaving both masculine characters as potentially accessible antecedents for the pronoun. To address this issue, Arnold and colleagues conducted a VWP exper-iment where visual context disambiguated the antecedent toward either the first- or the second-mentioned character. Sixteen 4- to 5-year-old children performed a sentence-picture verification task as they listened to a story (5) while looking at the picture with Mickey Mouse / Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck / Daisy (see Figure 5A):

(5) a. Donald/Daisy is bringing some mail to Mickey/Minnie, while a big storm is beginning.

b. He/she is carrying an umbrella, and it looks like they’re both going to need it.

A. Arnold et al. (2007)a B. Hartshorne et al. (2014)b

C. Pyykkönen et al. (2010)c D. Hollebrandse et al. (2012)bv

E. Clackson et al. (2011)d F. Sekerina et al. (2004)

G. Järvikivi et al. (2014)e H. Engelen et al. (2014)f

A B C

a (Reprinted with permission from “Pronoun comprehension in young children,” by J. E. Arnold, S. Brown-Schmidt, & J. C. Trueswell. From Language and Cognitive Processes, 22(4), pp. 527–565, Fig. 27. Copyright © 2007 Taylor & Francis.)b I thank Joshua Hartshorne and Bart Hollebrandse for their permission to reproduce these figures.c (Reprinted with permission from “Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension: a visual world study of pronoun resolution,” by P. Pyykkönen, D. Matthews, & J. Järvikivi. From Language and Cognitive Processes, 25, 115–129. Fig. 2. Copyright © 2010 Taylor & Francis.)

Figure 5. Visual scenes from the child VWP studies (Sections 4.1–4.5).



The preamble (5a) and visual context (Figure 5A) disambiguated the pro-noun’s antecedent toward the first- or second-mentioned antecedent depending on which character was carrying an umbrella. Critically, the disambiguation in-formation occurred at 650 ms after the pronoun onset.

The results were parallel to the ones from Experiment 1. Gender, but not order-of-mention information, was used by children to establish coreference between the pronoun and the antecedent in real time. They looked more at the correct referent in the different-gender condition starting at 400 ms after the on-set of the pronoun, but showed no preference to fixate on the first-mentioned character in the same-gender conditions anywhere during the course of the sen-tence. The authors concluded that the morphological information (e.g., gender) is a powerful cue that children as young as 4 years successfully and rapidly use to interpret pronouns online. However, the order-of-mention constraint, in contrast to the findings by Song and Fisher (2005, 2007), was not fully acquired at this age.

A. Arnold et al. (2007)a B. Hartshorne et al. (2014)b

C. Pyykkönen et al. (2010)c D. Hollebrandse et al. (2012)bv

E. Clackson et al. (2011)d F. Sekerina et al. (2004)

G. Järvikivi et al. (2014)e H. Engelen et al. (2014)f

A B C

d (Reprinted with permission from “Children’s processing of pronouns and reflexives in English: Evidence from eye-movements during listening,” by K. Clackson, C. Felser, & H. Clahsen. From Journal of Memory and Language, 65, 128–144. Appendix B. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier.)e (Reprinted with permission from “Information structure cues for 4-year-olds and adults: tracking eye movements to visually presented anaphoric referents,” by J. Järvikivi, P. Pyykkönen-Klauck, S. Schimke, S. Colonna, & B. Hemforth. From Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, FirstView, 1–16. Figure 1. Copyright © 2013 Taylor & Francis.)

f (Reprinted with permission from “Eye movements reveal differences in children’s referential processing during narrative comprehension,” by J. A. A. Engelen, S. Bouwmeester, A. B. H. de Bruin, & R. A. Zwaan. From Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 118, 57–77. Appendix B. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier.)

Figure 5. (continued)



4.1.2 Hartshorne et al. (2014)Given the conflicting findings from Song and Fisher (2005, 2007) and Arnold and colleagues (2007) the role of the order-of-mention constraint (i.e., first-mention bias) remains an unresolved issue in the acquisition of pronominal reference by young children. Arnold at al. argued that the children in Song and Fisher’s studies were sensitive to the first-mention bias because it was confounded by the presence of other discourse prominence constraints. Hartshorne and colleagues (2014) proposed a different explanation, that of a slow processing speed that gradually increases during development.

They recorded pointing responses and eye movements of 40 five-year-old English-speaking children. The children listened to sentences in four conditions while viewing a picture with animate characters either of different gender (Emily and Michael) or of the same gender (Emily and Hannah) (see Figure 5B). The dif-ferent-gender sentence (6a) was the control condition, (6b) was the first-mention condition, and (6c) the short/long repeated-mention condition.

(6) a. Emily played baseball with Michael. She/he hit five home runs. b. Emily went to school with Hannah. She read ten books. c. Emily and Hannah are going to Disneyland. Emily has never been to

Disneyland. [Disneyland has lots of fun activities. It also has great food.] She is really excited about going to Disneyland.

d. Can you point to her?

Critically, in contrast to Arnold et al.’s materials, there was no disambiguation information either in the sentence or in the visual scene, and both characters re-mained potential antecedents for the ambiguous pronoun she in (6b–c). The long repeated-mention (6c) condition was critical in providing the children with addi-tional time to select the intended (first-mentioned in the preamble) referent (e.g., Emily). The children’s pointing responses were at ceiling in the control condition (6a), but they chose the first-mentioned character significantly less (76%) in the two experimental conditions (6b–c) than the adults (94%).

For the eye-movement measure, the authors chose to analyze switches from the distractor (Hannah) to the target referent (Emily) and calculated the aver-age time window when participants’ fixations to the target reliably diverged from those to the distractor after the onset of the pronoun. The results clearly demon-strated that, in contrast to Arnold et al.’s (2007) findings, the children were able to use the first-mention constraint to select the referent for the ambiguous pronouns, but it happened much later (i.e., at 1400–1500 ms after the onset of the pronoun) than the disambiguation time window that Arnold and colleagues designated (i.e., 600–800 ms). Moreover, even the adults were slow to use the first-mention constraint (i.e., at 1100–1200 ms), making it the slowest and the least informative



overall. Hartshorne and colleagues concluded that children are sensitive not only to the morphological gender constraint, but also to the first-mention bias, but its successful application in real time depends on the processing speed that is still developing in childhood.

4.2 Verb transitivity constraint: 3-year-old children (Pyykkönen et al., 2010)

Pyykkönen and colleagues (2010) investigated the role of semantic constraints in the form of verb transitivity on very young children’s online interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. They used two groups of 10 verbs each; in one condition they included high transitivity verbs like hit and climb up that subcategorize for arguments with many prototypical agent- and patient-like features, and in an-other condition, they included low transitivity verbs like see and hide that take objects with very few such features. Fifteen 3-year-old English-speaking children listened to four-sentence stories (7) while passively viewing pictures depicting three referents and the action for sentence (see Figure 5C); no direct action task was employed. The ambiguous pronoun was the first word in (7c):

(7) a. The panda hit/saw the parrot near the hut. b. What do you think happened next? c. He did something very silly. d. He climbed up/hid in the hut.

Children’s gaze directions were recorded from the onset of the pronoun in the third sentence in (7) with the help of the projector version of the ‘poor man’s’ eye- tracker using 40 ms resolution. Eye movements after the onset of the pronoun were averaged into five time windows of 520 ms each. The design was 2x2, with verb transitivity (high vs. low) crossed with the grammatical role of the potential antecedent (subject vs. object).

Starting from the second time window (200 ms after the onset of the pro-noun), the children looked more to both characters (e.g., panda and parrot) in the high transitivity verb condition than in the low transitivity verb condition. Then 500 ms later, the verb transitivity interacted with the grammatical role, as evi-denced by more looks to the subject, but only for the low transitivity verbs. These results suggest that 3-year-old children are sensitive to semantic constraints in the form of verb transitivity: high transitivity enhances salience of both arguments whereas low transitivity matters only for the subject of the sentence.



4.3 Principles A and B of the Binding Theory: 4- to 9-year-old children (Clackson et al., 2011; Hollebrandse et al., 2012)

The application of Principles A and B in interpretation of reflexives and personal pronouns by children of various ages and in many languages has been one of the central topics in language acquisition research for 20 years. However, it was not until very recently that the first VWP experiment was conducted to investigate children’s online application of these two principles.

4.3.1 Clackson et al. (2011)Clackson and colleagues (2011) conducted a VWP study with 40 English-speaking children in two age groups, 6–7 years and 8–9 years, using the projection screen version of the ‘poor man’s’ eye-tracker. In Experiment 1, children’s interpretation of reflexives and pronouns was assessed with a standard offline sentence-picture matching task. A single-sentence preamble introduced two potential animate ref-erents that were either of different natural gender, creating a single-match anteced-ent (different-gender condition), or of the same gender, creating a double-match antecedent (same-gender condition). This task was followed by a comprehension question with the reflexive or the pronoun (e.g., This is Christopher Robin, this is Pooh Bear. Is Pooh Bear scratching himself/him?). A single picture depicting the ac-tion of scratching by one of the two referents was presented simultaneously with the sentence. As expected, all of the children scored near ceiling in the reflexives and different-gender conditions (98% accuracy), but were significantly worse in the same-gender condition (86.5%), sometimes incorrectly accepting the picture in which Pooh Bear was scratching himself (a response of “no” was required), thus confirming the Delay of Principle B effect (DPBE; see Section 3).

The VWP Experiment 2 tested the children’s ability to apply Principles A and B of the BT to rule out potential but inaccessible antecedents in real time. The 2x2 design crossed gender of the referent (different- vs. same-gender) with the type of anaphoric expression (reflexive vs. pronoun). The children listened to stories like (8) while viewing the visual scenes illustrated in Figure 5E.

(8) a. Peter/Susan was waiting outside the corner shop. b. He/she watched as Mr. Jones bought a huge box of popcorn for himself/

him/her over the counter. c. Did Mr. Jones buy some popcorn?

The visual display contained four referents: the two animate characters men-tioned in the preamble (Peter/Susan and Mr. Jones), the mentioned inanimate ob-ject (popcorn), and a distractor (boat). Using the video recording of the children’s



faces, their gaze duration was assessed from the onset of the reflexive/pronoun during the following 2 seconds (50 frames).

For the reflexives, the looks to the accessible antecedent for himself (Mr. Jones) steadily increased for both the adults and the children. In the different-gender re-flexive condition, it happened at 200 ms after the onset for the adults, and at 400 ms for the children whereas in the same-gender condition, there was a slight de-lay. In contrast to the adults, the children also looked more at the inaccessible gen-der-matched referent (Peter) demonstrating failure to apply Principle A online and a strong reliance on discourse prominence constraints. For the personal pro-nouns, eye movements were similar for the two groups. Both the adults and the children started to fixate on the accessible antecedent for him/her (Peter/Susan) more from 200 ms after the onset of the pronoun, but the looks to the inaccessible gender-matched antecedent (Mr. Jones) also increased in the same fashion for both groups. Across the board, the younger children (6–7 years) were more likely to consider the inaccessible antecedent than the older children (8–9 years).

Clackson and colleagues concluded that although the principles of the BT are applied online by children, they do not act as early filters to block inaccessible antecedents; the latter remain very salient for children who tend to rely strongly on discourse prominence constraints. Finally, the findings provided additional support for the dissociation between children’s interpretation of the anaphoric expressions in offline and online tasks discussed above (Bergmann et al., 2012; Sekerina et al., 2004; see Section 2 above). Even though the children’s offline inter-pretation of reflexives was adult-like, their consideration of the inaccessible reflex-ive antecedent reflected in eye movements was not. Not surprisingly, the online competition from the inaccessible antecedent for the pronoun was even stronger, manifesting itself in eye movements that confirm the DPBE and resulting in non-adult-like errors in offline interpretation of pronouns for some children.

4.3.2 Hollebrandse et al. (2012)The Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) for children confirmed by Clackson et al.’s (2011) VWP experiment can nevertheless be decreased when discourse coher-ence is strong. Hollebrandse and colleagues (2012) conducted an experiment with 4- to 6-year-old Dutch-speaking children in which they manipulated the number of referents (one or two) and the order in which one is presented first in the pre-amble: single referent (patient) (9a), agent-patient (9b), and patient-agent (9c). In their materials, the ambiguous pronoun was used in the direct object position, in contrast to the previous studies where it was always in the subject position (9d).

(9) a. Hier zie je een dino. ‘Here you see a dinosaur.’



b. Hier zie je een olifant en een dino. ‘Here you see an elephant and a dinosaur.’ c. Hier zie je een dino en een olifant. ‘Here you see a dinosaur and an elephant.’ d. De olifant slaat hem met een hamer. ‘The elephant hits him with a hammer.’

After listening to one of the three preambles (9a–c), the children were presented with a single picture (Figure 5D) depicting the hitting event, in which the agent (elephant) hits the patient (dinosaur) with the hammer. It was predicted that the single referent (9a) and patient-agent order (9c) preambles would result in fewer DPBE errors in children.

Children’s performance in the control reflexive conditions was very accurate, but in the pronoun conditions, they seemed to fall into three groups: adult-like (N = 18), exhibiting the DPBE (N = 13), and exhibiting other types of errors (N = 9). The prediction that the single referent in the preamble would weaken the DPBE was borne out only for the adult-like children: eye movements launched to the patient (e.g., dinosaur) after hearing the preamble (9a) resulted in fewer DPBE errors and a significant increase in looks to the patient starting at 750 ms after the onset of the pronoun hem ‘him’ in (9d). However, in contrast to the adults, none of the child groups was sensitive to the order of introduction of the two anteced-ent referents in the preamble, as their looks to the patient after the patient-agent preamble (9c) did not increase. The authors concluded that only some discourse constraints (e.g., enhanced salience of the antecedent) improve interpretation of ambiguous pronouns by young children, whereas others (e.g., the order of intro-duction of two antecedents) do not.

4.4 Exceptional short-distance pronouns: 4- to 7-year-old children (Sekerina et al., 2004)

The VWP studies by Clackson et al. (2011) and Hollebrandse et al. (2012) in-vestigated the environments that are regulated by Principles A and B of the BT (see Examples (8) and (9) above). However, for special cases of reference, i.e., disjoint, discourse, and accidental reference, and short-distance pronouns, that represent exceptions to the classical syntactic BT, additional semantic and prag-matic constraints have been proposed. In our eye-tracking study (Sekerina et al., 2004), we investigated one such special case, namely, English short-distance pro-nouns (SDP). SDP environments represent an exception to Principle B because the preference for the pronoun within the preposition phrase behind her in (10)



is to co-refer with the sentence-internal antecedent (the girl, indicated by index 1) instead of with some unmentioned sentence-external antecedent.

(10) The girl1 has placed the ball behind her1/2.

In the VWP experiment, we presented pairs of pictures to the control group of adults and the experimental group of 4- to 7-year-old children (Figure 5F) and asked them to perform a picture selection task while their eye movements were recorded. While the adults’ explicit button press responses demonstrated the sentence-internal antecedent preference (e.g., the girl), they still selected the sen-tence-external antecedent (e.g., the woman) in 20% of the cases. Their eye move-ments showed that the choice of the antecedent for the pronoun was established at 500 ms from its onset. The children’s pointing responses confirmed their over-whelming preference for the sentence-internal antecedent of the pronoun (93%), but their eye movements revealed the same competition in fixations between the two pictures as adults showed in the pronoun condition. The difference in the time course of pronominal reference resolution was simply quantitative as the children completed the process about 1 second later than the adults.

We proposed that children’s difficulty in establishing coreference with the sentence-external antecedent stems from their limited processing resources, as constructing two parallel coreference relations, keeping both active in work-ing memory, and selecting the appropriate one is cognitively taxing. Note that Hartshorne and colleagues (2014) essentially endorse an explanation along the same lines for children’s delay in applying the first-mention constraint, specifical-ly by singling out the core component of cognitive resources – underdeveloped processing speed. Under favorable conditions, multiple constraints interact and converge on the appropriate antecedent, and in such cases, with extra time, even young children show a robust ability to interpret anaphoric expressions in real time. Moreover, fine-grained measures such as eye-tracking allow us to argue that the process of pronominal reference resolution by children qualitatively looks re-markably like that of adults.

4.5 Information structure constraints: 4-year-old children (Järvikivi et al., 2014)

The question of which constraints are powerful enough for children to use by themselves in interpreting ambiguous pronouns (e.g., gender) and which need to be boosted by the simultaneous use of other cues (e.g., order-of-mention) was ad-dressed by Järvikivi and colleagues (2014) in a VWP experiment with 4-year-old German-speaking children. In German, just like in English, the first-mentioned



referent (i.e., the subject) is strongly preferred as an antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun in pronominal reference resolution. The authors manipulated the sa-lience of two potential antecedents, i.e., the subject (Hase ‘rabbit’) and the direct object (Fuchs ‘fox’) in (11), using one of the focus-related information-structure devices, namely, cleft constructions (Järvikivi et al.’s example 2). In a 2x2 design, construction (no cleft or cleft) was crossed with word order (SVO or OVS) (Ex-ample (11) illustrates the Cleft, SVO condition):

(11) Es ist der Hase, der den Fuchs kitzelt an dem Bergsee, als er gerade an etwas ganz besonders Lustiges denkt.

‘It is the rabbit who tickles the fox at the mountain lake, when he just thinks about something particularly funny.’

Adults (control group) and children listened to a short narrative consisting of a preamble sentence that introduced the two referents, the experimental sentence (11) whose second clause contained the ambiguous pronoun er ‘he’, and a filler. The visual display was a series of three animated pictures (Figure 5G) in which the animal referents were shown to perform the transitive action, i.e., tickling in (11). The experiment employed a ‘look and listen’ passive task, and participants’ eye movements were analyzed in a time window from 200 ms before the onset of the pronoun to 2000 ms after.

The eye-movement patterns showed that in general, adults preferred the sub-ject antecedent regardless of clefting. In contrast, children’s preference to select the focused referent as the antecedent of the pronoun was enhanced by the cleft construction, but it happened in the time window 200–1400 ms, and only the subject antecedent was affected (not the object antecedent). The authors also showed an early object antecedent preference (200–800 ms) similar to the one found by Pyykkönen et al. (2010) for high transitivity verbs. Järvikivi and col-leagues (2014) concluded that the order-of-mention constraint, although weak, is used by children as young as 4 years, but it gets stronger as children reach the age of 6 years, an explanation similar in spirit to the developing processing speed of Hartshorne et al. (2014). The experiment proves that it is possible to boost the weak order-of-mention constraint by focusing the first-mentioned antecedent (i.e., subject) with the help of an information structure device such as clefting. These results also support that idea that while each single constraint may not be powerful enough to be used by children in real time, the combination and inter-action of multiple constraints lead to successful pronominal reference resolution in language development.



4.6 Discourse constraints in narratives: 6- to 11-year-old children (Engelen et al., 2014)

The child eye-tracking studies on the resolution of pronominal reference reviewed in Sections 4.1 through 4.5 focused on the identification of constraints from lan-guage domains such as morphology (gender), semantics (verb subcategorization), syntax (the Binding Theory), and information structure (order-of-mention), as well as the interaction between them, with the goal of investigating how children select an antecedent for anaphoric expressions. To maintain rigorous experimen-tal conditions, these studies were based on carefully constructed short narratives, up to 3–4 sentences long. Recently, Engelen and colleagues (2014) extended this work to more natural situations in which children are confronted with longer spoken discourse that stretches over many utterances. They conducted a VWP experiment with 63 six- to eleven-year-old Dutch-speaking children in which participants listened to a 7-minute story about four animals while simultaneously viewing their pictures (Figure 5H). There were 28 names and 14 anaphoric pro-nouns in the story, and it was predicted that once the character was mentioned in the text, a fixation to the picture would follow within 2 seconds (control adults fixated 82% of pictures for the nouns and 65% for the pronouns).

Latent class regression analysis was used to divide the child participants into poor (N = 39) and good comprehenders (N = 24) based on a comprehension test of the story. The results revealed that in general, children looked less at the pictures as the story progressed and were less likely to make anticipatory fixa-tions to the pictures for the names compared to the pronouns. These two effects were modulated by the comprehension profile: the difference between names and pronouns was larger, the number of anticipatory fixations was higher, and the decrease in fixations from the beginning to the end of story was stronger for good comprehenders than for poor ones. Thus, Engelen and colleagues showed that it is not only the linguistic constraints and their interaction that play an important role in the resolution of pronominal reference by children, but also participants’ individual differences. Good comprehenders regardless of age were better at tak-ing advantage of the discourse constraints, such as order-of-mention and names vs. pronouns, and were able to successfully apply these constraints in real time.

4.7 Summary: Constraints, their interaction and time course

In sum, the results of ‘direct action’ tasks from the eye-tracking studies reviewed in this section have confirmed that children from the age of 4 years who acquire English, Dutch, and German can successfully establish the antecedent referent for reflexives (Bergmann et al., 2012; Clackson et al., 2011; Hollebrandse et al.,



2012; Järvikivi et al., 2014; Sekerina et al., 2004). However, in contrast to adults, their eye-movement patterns revealed that they launch fixations to the antecedent later and demonstrate a protracted competition in looks from the competitor, the inaccessible antecedent, thus failing to apply Principle A of the Binding Theory in real time (Clackson et al., 2011).

Establishing the antecedent for a pronoun, on the other hand, is still an issue for children as old as 6 years, and it only gradually improves well into the mid-dle school years, until the age of 11 to 12 years. Children are very slow in doing it – the process can take them up to 1500 ms (Hartshorne et al., 2014). Certain linguistic constraints – morphological, i.e., gender (Arnold et al., 2007), semantic, i.e., verb transitivity (Pyykkönen et al., 2010), and information structure-related, e.g., focus (Järvikivi et al., 2014) – can make the antecedent more salient and thus improve and speed up pronominal reference resolution in children. Syntac-tic (Principle B of the Binding Theory; Clackson et al., 2011) and discourse con-straints (i.e., order-of-mention, subjecthood, and order of introduction of two antecedents; Arnold et al., 2007; Hollebrandse et al., 2012; Järvikivi et al., 2014; Sekerina et al., 2004), are the slowest to develop and the least informative overall. Finally, children look less at the antecedents when processing longer discourse, especially if they are poor comprehenders (Engelen et al., 2014), and are slower overall (Sekerina et al., 2004) than adults in pronominal reference resolution.

5. Closing remarks

With the flexibility and sensitivity afforded to us by the VWP technique, we can map out future directions for exploring the ways children interpret reflexives and pronouns in real time. These include theoretical, cross-linguistic, developmental, populational, and methodological perspectives. From the point of view of the-oretical linguistics, only a few constraints from several language domains have been tested so far. We need to investigate additional constraints on pronominal reference resolution and their hierarchy, as well as look more closely at how they interact with each other.

The eye-tracking studies reviewed in this chapter were conducted with chil-dren who speak English, Dutch, or German. Bearing in mind the vast literature on offline acquisition of anaphoric expressions in many different languages, it is imperative that we conduct pronoun interpretation studies in other languages. For example, those languages that exhibit flexible word order and place an em-phasis on information status of arguments (Slavic), use pronominal clitics (Ro-mance), and allow null arguments (Japanese, Korean, Turkish), or other complex linguistic devices in their pronominalization systems, would be useful for future



investigation. Studying how the pronominal systems of two or more languages are acquired and how they are put to use in online processing by bilingual children also warrants our special attention.

Most studies conducted so far focused on cross-sectional studies with young children, 3- to 6-year-olds, and their ability to interpret anaphoric expressions online. These studies identified the first developmental markers of the acquisi-tion trajectory for processing of reflexives and pronouns: for example, children of this age need at least an additional second or more compared to adults to take into consideration the order-of-mention constraint in identifying the appropriate antecedent for a pronoun. Now we need longitudinal and multi-group cross-sec-tional designs to learn how children acquire the ability to interpret anaphoric ex-pressions in an adult-like manner, what impedes this progress, and at which point in their cognitive and language development the process is completed.

Using the developmental trajectory of typical online interpretation of reflex-ives and pronouns, we will be able to compare it to special child populations that are known to exhibit problems in pronominal reference resolution – children with specific language impairment, autism spectrum disorders, cochlear implants, and other developmental conditions (see Chondrogianni, this volume).

Finally, the newly introduced combination of eye-tracking with event-related brain potentials in adult psycholinguistics holds a special promise in answering existing and future questions in the area of online interpretation of anaphoric expressions by children. These perspectives – cross-linguistic, theoretical, devel-opmental, populational, and methodological – will be driving research in experi-mental developmental psycholinguistics in the near future.

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers and the guest editors of this volume, Ludovica Serratrice and Shanley Allen, for their valuable comments and suggestions on the earlier version of this chapter. Special thanks go to Bart Hollebrandse and Petra Hendriks, and Joshua Hartshorne for supplying examples of their experimental materials.

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