The Acquisition of Binding Principles across Languages: A Literature Review

The acquisition of Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981) has been a central battlefield in generative child language acquisition and Second Language Acquisition for over three decades. Cross-linguistic evidence demonstrates early, adult-like mastery of Principles A and C, consistent with Universal Grammar. However, children’s interpretation of Principle B has historically exhibited a pronounced delay—widely termed the Pronoun Interpretation Problem (PIP). This review provides a comprehensive synthesis of the theoretical and empirical literature surrounding the PIP. We highlight the traditional contrast between the acquisition patterns of the binding constraints, and link the relevant explanatory accounts, spanning pragmatic deficits (Principle P), initial governing category parameterization, working memory constraints on reference-set computation (Reinhart, 2006), and the Quantificational Asymmetry and Antecedent-Contained Deletion ellipsis (Chien & Wexler, 1990; Kiguchi & Thornton, 2004). Moreover, we provide a detailed evaluation of first language acquisition research in Arabic dialects. Finally, we review recent studies re-examining the persistence of the PIP under task-bias-controlled paradigms, including eye-tracking with toddlers (Emond & Shi, 2024), the satisfaction of pragmatic felicity conditions (Conroy et al., 2009), and the Coloring Book Task (Pinto & Zuckerman, 2019). We conclude that the PIP remains a vibrant area for investigation, situated at the critical intersection of contrasting standpoints.