BACKGROUND A number of studies have suggested that language in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may not be simply delayed compared with language in typically developing (TD) children, but deviant. The deviance has been detected in the comprehension of pronouns, and it has triggered proposals for the existence of a specific syntactic deficit in individuals with DS. However, the developmental ...

In this paper we present a cognitive model of the acquisition and use of referring expressions in discourse. In certain discourse contexts, children produce unrecoverable pronouns where a full NP would have been the adult choice. Based on computational simulations of our model, we argue that adult-like use of referring subjects requires (a) sufficient working memory capacity to identify the dis...

This paper presents a study of the effect of working memory load on the interpretation of pronouns in different discourse contexts: stories with and without a topic shift. We discuss a computational model (in ACT-R, Anderson, 2007) to explain how referring expressions are acquired and used. On the basis of simulations of this model, it is predicted that WM constraints only affect adults' pronou...

Participants in this study were 66 British toddlers who were observed at home with familiar peers on two occasions, six months apart. The majority of toddlers spoke to their peers, with short sequences of conversation emerging after the age of 24 months. The use of possessive pronouns emerged between 18 and 24 months of age and consolidated over the next year. Toddlers who said ‘mine’ were also...

Evidence suggests that speakers can take account of the addressee's needs when referring. However, what representations drive the speaker's audience design has been less clear. This study aims to go beyond previous studies by investigating the interplay between the visual and linguistic context during audience design. Speakers repeated subordinate descriptions (e.g., firefighter) given in the p...

Abstract This paper mainly discusses the distribution and rhetorical functions of personal pronouns in English Chinese legal news reports which is divided into two narrative types, objective semi-dialogic. Through comparative analysis some texts it finds that differences type directly affect pronouns. In narrative, use third person accounts for an absolute proportion, frequency using first seco...

This paper reports on an experimental study of donkey pronouns, pronouns (e.g. it) whose meaning covaries with that of a non-pronominal noun phrase (e.g. a donkey) even though they are not in a structural relationship that is suitable for quantifier-variable binding. We investigate three constraints, (i) the preference for the presence of an overt NP antecedent that is not part of another word,...