Master Thesis: The Acquisition of Pronouns in Dutch

Task Effects, Behavioural Phenomena, and the Role of Grammatical Gender

Summary

The acquisition of referential expressions, such as pronouns or reflexives, is subject to continuous examination. More than 25 years ago, first reports on a puzzling phenomenon started this line of research. Children produce pronouns correctly and do not mix them with the closely related reflexives. At the same time, namely up to the age of 7, they confuse pronouns and reflexives during comprehension.

We found this result very puzzling and looked at the basis for such claims: the experimental method. Most studies on language comprehension in children is based on game-like methods that generally require an explicit behavioural response, such as answering questions or pointing to pictures, of the child. These responses are equalled to correct or flawed comprehension and thus disregard intermediate processes that might disrupt comprehension or hinder the expression of what has been understood by the child.

Consequently, we examined a possible effect of the task by contrasting a typical response-based task with eye tracking. Eye tracking is relatively undemanding, it does not require any additional tasks beyond watching movies or looking at pictures while listening to speech. Eye movements are dependent on attentional processes and it has been shown that we look at the visual representation of what we think about, in this case what we hear.

We found indeed that the task makes a difference. Beyond that, we also saw that children seemed to use heuristics during the response-based tasks and that gender makes a difference.

More Information

This Open Science Framework site serves as hub, linking to publications and materials relating to this project: osf.io/2nv3y/

This is the main Paper (pdf; 1.1MB; External link to journal website via DOI: 10.1017/S0305000911000298) describing the initial findings.

Preliminary follow-up data were presented as a poster.

Supervisor: Prof. Paula Fikkert

Collaborator: Prof. Markus Paulus