Parsing for Principle C at 30 Months

An important concern in language acquisition research is that behavior on a given task can be indicative both of children’s underlying knowledge and of their ability to deploy that knowledge. Therefore, to accurately uncover the nature of children’s grammatical knowledge, it is necessary to take into account variability in deployment processes. In this study, we will use children’s acquisition of binding Principle C (Chomsky 1981) as a test case to demonstrate that differences in the efficiency of deployment can be indicative of the nature of the underlying grammatical knowledge. Principle C, as stated in (1), prohibits co-reference between an R-expression and a pronoun that c-commands it. Pronouns can generally refer anaphorically to any expression with matching phi-features, as in (2a), where she may refer to either Anna or Katie. However, Principle C places a constraint against coreference, barring co-reference with any R-expression in the c-command domain of the pronoun; this effect can be seen in (2b), where she cannot refer to Katie.