Children’s processing of reflexives and pronouns in English: Evidence from eye-movements during listening

This study examined how 6–9 year-old English-speaking children and adults establish anaphoric dependencies during auditory sentence comprehension. Using eye-movement monitoring during listening and a corresponding sentence–picture judgment task, we investigated both the ultimate interpretation and the online processing of reflexives in comparison to non-reflexive pronouns, focusing on how binding constraints interact with a competitor antecedent’s relative (discourse) prominence. Whilst our offline results show that the children’s ultimate interpretation for reflexives was constrained by binding principles in the same way as adults’, the eye-movement data revealed that during processing, children were temporarily more distracted than adults when multiple cues supported a prominent competitor antecedent. These results indicate that in addition to binding principles, children’s online referential decisions are also affected by discourse-level information. We suggest that the observed child/adult differences stem from children’s greater difficulty, compared to adults, in controlling multiple sources of information during sentence comprehension.

► 6–9 year olds’ on-line anaphor resolution is not adult-like, despite perfect offline performance.
► Syntactic constraints and discourse information both influence on-line anaphor resolution early on.
► Primary school children are less able than adults to integrate different information sources during anaphor resolution.