Discourse and grammatical cues in the acquisition of Spanish pronouns

"From an acquisition standpoint, personal pronouns are particularly interesting to study because they are a perfect encapsulation of the problem faced by the language learner: how to coordinate information from multiple levels of representation while still in the process of acquiring those representations. Pronoun interpretation is influenced by constraints at every level of representation, from phonology to discourse, and acquisition at one level can constrain the path of acquisition at other levels. This dissertation focuses on the interaction between the levels of morphosyntax and discourse during development, specifically, how the acquisition of person and number features relates to the acquisition of discourse relations: the semantic relations between events and states in a discourse. Person and number cues provide bottom-up information about who the referent of a pronoun can and cannot be, while discourse relations provide top-down information about which referents are likely to be the targets of pronominal reference. The question for acquisition is very simple: Do children proceed bottom up or top down? Focusing on preschoolers acquiring Mexican Spanish, a language with abundant person and number cues, we divide the problem into three parts: Q1.Which person and number cues are children sensitive to, and when? Q2.Which discourse cues are children sensitive to, and when? Q3.How do children integrate these cues together at different ages? Person and number cues: In picture-selection and act-out tests, children show early comprehension of 1st and 2nd person morphology but inconsistent behavior in the 3rd person. Children are aware that 3rd person pronouns select a referent or antecedent from the preceding physical or linguistic discourse, but they fail to consistently choose referents compatible with their person and number morphology. Discourse cues: Adults use a combination of discourse relations and pronominal form (null vs. overt subjects) to interpret grammatically ambiguous subject pronouns. Children under 4 ½ show sensitivity to discourse relations, while children over 4 ½ show sensitivity to the null/overt contrast. Integration: Four picture-selection experiments examine children's sensitivity to different discourse relations, first in isolation and then in combination with person and number cues. When cues to the Parallel discourse relation appear in isolation, children show weak sensitivity at best. However, when parallelism and number cues are combined, parallelism has a facilitating effect on the comprehension of number by children ages 4 ½ and up. Moreover, this facilitating effect coincides with a jump in children's overall sensitivity to number morphology. When cues to the temporal discourse relation Occasion appear in isolation, we again find little evidence of sensitivity. However, when temporal and person cues are combined, temporal cues have a facilitating effect on the comprehension of 3rd person features by children ages 4 ½ and up. Moreover, this facilitating effect coincides with a jump in children's overall sensitivity to 3rd person morphology. In other words, we see a correlation between sensitivity to discourse relations (Parallel, Occasion) and adult-like use of person and number morphology. Do children proceed bottom-up or top-down? Children's difficulty with at least some person and number cues, plus their early sensitivity to at least some discourse cues, rules out a strictly bottom-up hypothesis. However, their early adult-like use of 1st and 2nd person morphology also rules out a strict topdown hypothesis. Instead, we come down in favor of a weak version of the top-down hypothesis. Specifically, we claim that while children have early representations of the full set of person and number features, this knowledge is more difficult to deploy when interpreting semantically and morphologically underspecified pronouns (3rd person singular and 3rd person plural), and that discourse sensitivity facilitates the interpretation of such pronouns."--Pages ii-iii.