Ambiguous Pronoun Processing Development : Probably not U - Shaped

In many cases, as exemplified by (2), third-person pronouns co-refer with the subject of the previous sentence. Arnold (1998) found that third-person subject pronouns co-referred with the pervious sentence’s subject in 64% of cases drawn from a corpus of children’s books. Numerous studies have shown that in many cases adults expect pronouns to co-refer with previous subjects, even in the absence of additional clues to reference and where alternate interpretations are plausible (Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2000; Corbett & Chang, 1983; Crawley, Stevenson, & Kleinman, 1990; Jarvikivi, van Gompel, Hyona, & Bertram, 2005). Thus, in (3), most adults prefer that she refer to Jane Austen, not Agatha Christie.