Inference and children's comprehension of pronouns

Abstract

Two experiments are reported that investigate the ability of 5 year olds to determine the reference of anaphoric pronouns. The first study shows that children have problems coping with more than one pronoun in a sentence and if they have to draw an inference to define the reference of a pronoun. The second study shows that the difficulty in assigning reference is not due to children merely forgetting the premise information but is due to the difficulty of carrying out the inference. There is an indication in the second study that some of the children may be using a syntactically oriented rule (that the pronoun should be assigned to a noun phrase that has a parallel function in the previous sentence), and that they are not drawing the appropriate inferences.