The role of inferences in children's comprehension of pronouns

Abstract

Several researchers have suggested that children have difficulty in drawing inferences to understand prose and, although inferences have been shown to be important in the reference decisions of adults there have been very few studies that have specifically investigated children's use of them in reference assignments. The results of the three sentence comprehension studies reported here suggest that some children are able to draw the relevant inferences to assign reference. But many children appear to use an order-of-mention strategy which biases them towards the first-mentioned noun phrase. This strategy seems to be adopted even when children are aware that the resulting pronoun assignment conflicts with their inferences. Children in the third study appear to be able to use local selectional information to reject a noun phrase chosen by their order-of-mention strategy but, at least at the youngest ages (4.5 years), children do not use the information provided by the whole sentence. These results are seen as yet another example of the lack of comprehension monitoring in young children.