On the Asymmetrical Difficulty of Acquiring Person Reference in French: Production Versus Comprehension

Young French children freely produce subject pronouns by the age of 2. However, by age 2 and a half they fail to interpret 3rd person pronouns in an experimental setting designed to select a referent among three participants (speaker, hearer, and other). No such problems are found with 1st and 2nd person pronouns. We formalize our analysis of these empirical results in terms of direction-sensitive optimizations, showing that uni-directionality of optimization, when combined with non-adult-like constraint rankings, explains the general acquisition pattern of 3rd person pronouns. Building on a specific analysis of assigning 3rd person reference by computing over alternatives (Heim 1991), we show that adult interpretation does not require bidirectional OT although it is fully compatible with it. What matters for comprehension in the domain investigated here is constraint ranking.