The influence of the temporal characteristics of events on children's
      pronoun resolution
Creators: name: Francey, Gillian Elaine
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2019

description: The main goal of the thesis was to determine whether the temporal
      characteristics of events influence 7- to 11-year-olds’ pronoun resolution
      to identify if this might explain contradictory findings in the literature
      regarding the age at which children demonstrate a subject bias
      interpretation of a pronoun. A second goal was to determine whether
      children demonstrate the same influence of aspectual morphemes in
      narrative contexts as shown by adults in previous research. A third goal
      was to examine whether literature written for children might provide a
      potential causal explanation (environmental exposure) for the pattern of
      development observed in the experimental work. Chapter 1 reviews the
      literature that is considered relevant to the experimental work. The
      experiments in Chapter 2 examined pronoun resolution following SourceGoal
      transfer of possession events expressed with imperfective or perfective
      grammatical aspect. Experiment 1a (children) and Experiment 1b (adults)
      examined ambiguous pronoun resolution, Experiments 2a and 2b examined
      children’s pronoun resolution following transfer events with different
      gender protagonists. In all experiments an effect of grammatical aspect
      was observed with children and adults selecting the Source protagonist
      more frequently when the event was expressed with imperfective than
      perfective aspect. Despite demonstrating an influence of grammatical
      aspect, unlike adults, children did not demonstrate a subject bias
      interpretation of an ambiguous pronoun following the imperfective
      expression of a transfer event and children were more likely than adults
      to demonstrate a Goal interpretation of the pronoun following perfectively
      expressed transfer events. Transfer of possession events have endpoints
      (they are telic) and this pattern of results suggests that the presence of
      an endpoint in the stimulus sentences influenced children’s tendency to
      resolve a subsequent pronoun towards the previous subject protagonist.
      This possibility was examined in Chapter 3. The experiments in Chapter 3
      examined the effect of grammatical aspect on adults’ (Experiment 3a) and
      children’s (Experiment 3b) resolution of ambiguous pronouns contained
      within events from two lexical aspect categories; those with inherent
      endpoints and those without. Adults and children were more likely to
      resolve the pronoun to the subject protagonist following events without
      endpoints than following events with endpoints. These findings support
      those reported in Chapter 2, showing that the inherent temporal
      characteristics of events influence adults’ and children’s pronoun
      resolution. Grammatical aspect had an influence on adults’ pronoun
      resolution only for events with endpoints. In contrast, grammatical aspect
      influenced children’s pronoun resolution for events from both lexical
      aspect categories. This was interpreted as a consequence of the smaller
      effect of grammatical aspect on children’s pronoun resolution which
      limited the opportunity to observe an interaction. The experiments in
      Chapter 4 examined the effect of grammatical aspect on children’s
      judgement of transfer events ongoingness (Experiment 4a) and on children’s
      pronoun resolution (Experiment 4b) when the events were embedded within
      narratives. In contrast to the previous experiments in the thesis where
      stimulus sentences were presented in isolation, the experiments in this
      chapter found an increase in children’s sensitivity to imperfective aspect
      with age. When asked immediately after the aspectual event, children’s
      judgement that imperfectively expressed events were ongoing increased with
      age as did their Source resolution of an ambiguous pronoun. When there was
      intervening text between the aspectual event and the question, children’s
      judgement that imperfectively expressed events were ongoing decreased with
      age, and similarly their Source resolution also decreased with age.
      Experiment 4c examined whether a short delay between the presentation of
      the aspectual sentence and the pronoun had the same effect as intervening
      text. This was confirmed: there was an age decrease in Source resolution
      for imperfectively expressed events but not for perfectively expressed
      events. These findings provide converging evidence that, like adults in
      previous research, older children take into account the temporal
      characteristics with which events are expressed and the inherent duration
      of events themselves in their construction of situation models during
      narrative comprehension. Chapter 5 examined the frequency with which verbs
      typically used to describe telic events (events with endpoints) and atelic
      events (events without endpoints) were expressed with imperfective and
      perfective aspect in a corpus of literature read by children within the
      age range 7- to 11-years. It also examined the coherence relations most
      likely to follow perfectively expressed transfer events and the
      grammatical subject of these coherence relations. Verbs were more often
      expressed with perfective than imperfective aspect. Verbs typically used
      to describe atelic events were expressed with imperfective aspect more
      frequently than verbs typically used to describe telic events. This
      pattern suggests that, within these two lexical aspect categories, a
      distributional bias in imperfective expression persists beyond young
      children’s language environment (Shirai &amp; Andersen, 1995).
      Perfectively expressed transfer events were more often followed by
      Occasion than other coherence relations (Elaboration, Result, Parallel,
      Explanation, Other). There was no evidence of a Goal re-mention bias
      generally following transfer events, there was evidence of a Goal
      remention bias within Occasion relations. These findings support the
      proposal that the temporal characteristics of events are a stronger
      predictor of the type of coherence relation that will follow events than
      the re-mention of particular protagonists. They further suggest that
      re-mention biases are contingent on coherence relations. Taken together
      the findings demonstrate that children’s pronoun resolution is influenced
      by both the inherent temporal characteristics of events and the
      grammatical aspect with which events are expressed. How these findings
      explain previously reported contradictory findings in the literature is
      discussed. How the findings inform our understanding of the nature of the
      difficulties some children experience with pronoun resolution is also
      discussed.