On Korean Children's Knowledge of Principle B

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Late emergence of Principle B relative to Principle A is widely observed in the L1 acquisition of Binding Principles. Chien and Wexler (1990) argued that the delayed acquisition of Principle B is attributed to the lack of pragmatic principles (called Principle P), not to the lack of Principle B. They took as evidence for their claim children’s better performance on binding interpretation of pronouns with a quantified antecedent than their performance on binding interpretation of pronouns with a referential antecedent. Following Chien and Wexler’s work, numerous studies replicated their experiments but the results of the studies were quite divergent. The present study attempts to readdress the issue of Principle B in child grammar by testing 49 Korean children’s performance (between the ages of 5 to 7) on the referential and quantificational binding interpretation for pronouns. We found the opposite pattern: children’s performance on referential reading for pronouns was more accurate than their performance on quantificational reading for pronouns. We consider Sorace and Serratrice (2009)’s Interface Vulnerability Hypothesis as possible explanation of the results.