The purpose of this paper is to evaluate different explanations of a particular pronoun error which children sometimes produce during language acquisition. This error involves children producing nonnominative pronouns in the subject position of some sentences (e.g. Her is kicking the ball). There has been an explanation of this phenomenon (known as the Agreement/Tense Omission Model, or ATOM) p...

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 ...

In recent years, pronouns have become a white-hot interface between language and social political issues. “My are he/they” signals allegiance to one side in the culture wars, as does whatever.” But there is surprisingly little philosophical work at this interface; paper aims chart main questions argue for some answers, with hope of stimulating more research.

Psychological investigations of pronoun resolution have implicitly assumed that the processes involved automatically provide a unique referent for every pronoun. We challenge this assumption and propose a new framework for studying pronoun resolution. Drawing on advances in discourse representation and global memory modeling, this framework suggests that automatic processes may not always ident...

This paper used self-paced reading to test processing preferences in pronoun interpretation in English two clause sentences. The results demonstrate that people’s preferences can be reversed by changing the coherence relation between the clauses. The results are not compatible with the existence of a single all-purpose strategy in pronoun resolution. Rather, the results support Kehler’s (2002) ...