Pronominal subject interpretation in temporal adjuncts in child Romanian

Abstract

The present paper reports the results of an experimental study on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora in child Romanian. In a picture-selection task, 3-, 5- and 8-year old monolingual Romanian children had to identify the matrix antecedent of 3rd person overt pronouns, null pronouns and demonstratives which were used as the subject in a temporal adjunct. The results showed that only 8-year-olds had adult-like antecedent preferences. At age 3 and at age 5, Romanian-speaking monolingual children do not distinguish between the discourse-pragmatics properties of overt and null 3rd person pronouns. With demonstratives, they have adult-like biases as early as age 3. This developmental asymmetry is accounted for in terms of the properties of the Romanian pronominal system, where overt pronominal subjects can occur in topic continuity contexts, on a par with null pronominal subjects. This overlap between the two types of pronominal subject can delay the identification of their discourse-pragmatics properties.

Keywords

• intra-sentential anaphora
• L1 Romanian
• null pronominal subject
• overt pronominal subject
• demonstrative