Pronoun Interpretation Problem in Discourse

We are especially grateful to the children, teachers and parents of the Haydnschool and the Nassauschool in Groningen for participating in this study. We would also like to thank Robbert Prins for making the drawings used in the experiment. 1 Pronoun Interpretation Problem in Discourse Many studies have shown that children as late as age 6;6 misinterpret object pronouns as coreferring with the subject about half the time. In contrast, two experiments addressing English children’s pronoun production (Bloom et al., 1994; de Villiers et al., 2006) show almost perfect usage. The aim of this study is to verify this asymmetry between pronoun production and comprehension for Dutch, and to investigate the effects of discourse and salience on pronoun production and comprehension. Employing a truth-value judgment task and an elicited production task, this study indeed finds such an asymmetry in 83 Dutch children (age range 4;5-6;6). Further, when object pronouns were established as the topic of the target sentence, the Pronoun Interpretation Problem dissolved entirely. These results are compatible with the asymmetrical grammar hypothesis (Hendriks & Spenader, 2006) and suggest, contrary to many previous claims, that children are highly proficient at using pragmatic clues in interpretation.