The Interpretation of Pronouns in Spanish Language Acquisition and Breakdown: Evidence for the "Principle B Delay" as a Non-Unitary Phenomenon

Abstract

It is well known that English and Dutch children often allow pronouns to refer to local c-commanding antecedents, the so-called Principle B Delay. A similar observation has been made for English agrammatics. This phenomenon, which we call the Pronoun Interpretation Problem (PIP), has been argued to be due to children's and agrammatics' difficulties with the application of a Pragmatic Principle regulating intrasentential coreference. In this article, we present experimental evidence from Spanish language acquisition and agrammatism showing that (i) in both Spanish children and Spanish agrammatics, the PIP is limited to Exceptional Case Marking constructions; (ii) the PIP is not a unitary phenomenon in the sense that it is partly a pragmatic and partly a morphosyntactic phenomenon; (iii) the PIP is not the result of incomplete acquisition or the loss of linguistic knowledge; and (iv) the results support a modular approach to Binding Theory as proposed by Reinhart and Reuland (1993) and Reuland (2001).