Factors Affecting Young Children's Use of Pronouns as Referring Expressions

Most studies of children's use of pronouns have focused either on the morphology of personal pronouns or on the anaphoric use of pronouns by older children. The current two studies investigated factors affecting children's choice of pronouns as referring expressions—in contrast with their use of full nouns and null references. In the first study it was found that 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children did not use pronouns differentially whether the adult (a) modeled a pronoun or a noun for the target object or (b) did or did not witness the target event (although there was evidence that they did notice and take account of the adult's witnessing in other ways). In the second study it was found that children of this same age (a) do not use pronouns to avoid unfamiliar or difficult nouns but (b) do use pronouns differently depending on the immediately preceding discourse of the experimenter (whether they were asked a specific question such as "What did X do?" or a general question such as "What happened?"). In the case of specific questions, children prefer to use a null reference but use some pronouns as well (almost never using full nouns); in the case of the generic questions, children use pronouns even more often (and use nouns more as well). This finding was corroborated by some new analyses of children's use of pronouns in specific discourse situations in previously published studies. These findings suggest that children's choice of pronouns as referring expressions in early language development is influenced more by the immediately preceding discourse than other kinds of factors.