RUNNING HEAD: SPONTANEOUS PRINCIPLE B 1 Delay of Principle B in Spontaneous Speech

There is a debate over whether children exhibit a delay in the development of Principle B, one of three chief binding principles. The present study examines spontaneous speech data from nine children and identifies Principle B errors in third person pronouns. The study uses spectrographic analysis on a sample of utterances to determine the frequency of cliticized pronoun use. The results found that children do not make Principle B errors in spontaneous speech, and that they do not use shortened pronoun forms more often than fully pronounced pronouns