The use of anaphoric pronouns by French children in narrative: evidence from constrained text production

International audienceThis paper describes the acquisition of the 3rd person pronoun ‘ il/elle ’ (he, she, it) in seven to twelve-year-old French children (N=58), in written production. An experiment was conducted to examine the relationship between the use of this anaphoric pronoun and the accessibility of the memory-trace of the corresponding referent in the texts. Referential accessibility in short texts was varied according to three factors: referential distance, thematization of the agent role (first sentence subject), and discourse focus. We found that the children were sensitive to the distance factor as early as 7;0, i.e. they used fewer personal pronouns when the referential distance increased. However, children of different ages differed in their weighting of the discourse focus factor and the thematization factor: the seven-year-olds (N=18) and the eleven-year-olds (N=20) were sensitive to variation of the discourse focus but not the thematization factor, while for the nine-yearolds (N=20) it was the reverse. The main results suggest: (a) when seven and nine-year-olds use the pronoun ‘ il/elle ’, they do not comply with the constraints associated with the accessibility of the memorytrace of the referent; (b) memory constraints have an effect from the age of 7;0, but only when the discourse focus is maintained. It was concluded that the discourse management of the French personal pronoun ‘ il/elle ’ is not totally mastered at 11;0: children cannot operationally integrate the whole array of constraints implied in anaphoric management