Direct object and reflexive pronoun elicitation

To elicit object pronominals, we used the syntactic island task (Varlokosta et al., 2014). In this task, participants were presented with pictures and for each picture, they were asked a question that triggers a reply with a because-clause containing a pronominal. The context strongly favors the use of a pronominal by making the antecedent very salient in the discourse. A picture was presented in which one animate character is preforming an action on another character or object. The experimenter described the picture in a sentence and then asked the child a why-question. The target response is a because-clause with a pronoun.

To elicit reflexive pronouns participants were presented pictures depicting a character doing a reflexive action. The participants were then asked "what is [this character] doing". The order of reflexive and object pronouns presentation was randomized. The target response is a simple sentence with a reflexive pronoun.