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Print exposure predicts pronoun comprehension strategies in children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2019

Jennifer E. ARNOLD ,
Laura CASTRO-SCHILO ,
Sandra ZERKLE  and
Leela RAO
Jennifer E. ARNOLD*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Laura CASTRO-SCHILO
Affiliation:
SAS Institute Inc.
Sandra ZERKLE
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Leela RAO
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
*
*Corresponding author: UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of Psychology and Neuroscience, Davie Hall #337B, CB #3270, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270. E-mail: jarnold@email.unc.edu
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Abstract

Language development requires children to learn how to understand ambiguous pronouns, as in Panda Bear is having lunch with Puppy. He wants a pepperoni slice. Adults tend to link he with Panda Bear, the prior grammatical subject, but young children either fail to exhibit this bias (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt & Trueswell, 2007) or do so more slowly than adults (Hartshorne et al., 2015a; Song & Fisher, 2005). In the current study, we test whether language exposure affects this bias in elementary-school-age children. Children listened to stories like the one above, and answered questions like “Who wants a pepperoni slice?” which reveal their pronoun interpretation. Individual variation in the rate of selecting the subject character correlated with measures of print exposure, such that children who read more are more likely to follow the subject bias. This is the first study to establish that print exposure affects spoken pronoun comprehension in children.

Keywords

reading print exposurepronoun comprehension

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Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 46 , Issue 5 , September 2019 , pp. 863 - 893
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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