2019/05/24 by Jennifer E. Arnold, Jennifer E. ARNOLD, Laura CASTRO-SCHILO +5 · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Language Development and Disorders #Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism #Reading and Literacy Development
paper · doi:10.1017/s0305000919000102
openalex publication_date 2019/05/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
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 Puppy, 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.