Children's Acquisition of the Locality Condition for Reflexives and Pronouns.

Three experiments investigated the development in young children of two concepts: the antecedent possibilities for reflexives (e.g., himself or herself) and pronouns (e.g., him or her). In the first experiment, 156 English-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;6 and 21 adults were tested for their understanding of antecedents within reflexive sentences, pronoun sentences, and gender-control pronoun sentences. The results for reflexive sentences were as predicted by the Lexical Learning Hypothesis, but the pronoun sentence results were not. Following up this earlier experiment with similar subject groups, the second study tested infinitival structures and gender control for reflexives and the third tested whether the youngest children had the linguistic knowledge that reflexives and pronouns need non-local antecedents. In general, when relative patterns rather than absolute scores or ages are considered, the results of the later studies replicated the results of tho earlier experiment: when the target task is to make col:eference judgments between the reflexive or pronoun and the two sentence-internal antecedents, children do differentiate reflexive from pronoun sentences in all experiments, regardless of complement type and the different tasks required. However, a developmental delay in acquisition of non-locality condition for pronouns suggests a need for additional investigation of the Lexical Learning Hypothesis. (MSE) *****************************a***************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ***********************************************************************