The developm nt of discourse mapping processes : fhe on -

The present research focuses on how children integrate the antecedent of different kinds of anaphor into their on-going interpretation of an utterance, and on the kinds of cues they use to help them to do this. Theae issues were studied by examining the on-line processing of three types of anaphoric devices -repeated noun phrases, general terms and pronoun anaphors. The data showed that by the age of five, anaphoric mapping processes in general are well-mastered, although all age-groups (5, 7, 10 year olds and adults) found general term anaphors more difficult to interpret. The major developmental differences concerned the processing of anaphoric pronouns. For five year olds, pronouns were primarily interpreted as devices which maintained the themaric subject (If the discourse, but ,:hen there was no thematic subject they relied primarily on pragmatic plausibility in their assignment of pronominal co-reference. As children get older, thev are able to take advantage of the lexical properties of pronouns and all three sources of information-lexical, pragmatic inference and the thematic structure of the discourse-p1a.v contributory roles in the assignment of reference to a