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www.elsevier.com/locate/pragmaJournal of Pragmatics 56 (2013) 15--30

The effect of individual discourse-pragmatic features onreferential choice in child English

Mary E. Hughes a,*, Shanley E.M. Allen b

aBoston University, Two Silber Way, Boston, MA 02215, USAbPsycholinguistics and Language Development Group, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kaiserslautern,

Erwin-Schrödinger-Straße, Bldg. 57, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany

Received 24 January 2011; received in revised form 7 May 2013; accepted 10 May 2013

Abstract

Previous research has shown that children attend to discourse-pragmatics (e.g. newness, joint attention) when they producereferential forms in both languages that permit subject omission and those that do not. However, studies in languages that do not permitsubject omission have been limited to only one or two discourse-pragmatic features, bilingual participants, and/or data taken fromtranscripts rather than videotapes. In the present study, we extend this work by investigating how English-speaking children attend to sixdiscourse-pragmatic features, using videotaped data so that context for all features can be accurately assessed. We find that children asyoung as 2;0 are sensitive to these discourse-pragmatic features in selecting each of four referential forms: omitted subject, pronominal,demonstrative, and lexical noun phrase. PRIOR MENTION, PHYSICAL PRESENCE, and JOINT ATTENTION emerge as the mostsalient individual features, and children are sensitive to the features in combination.© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Argument realization; Accessibility; Null subject; Referential choice

1. Introduction

It has been widely observed that young children up to about 4 years of age omit subjects from their sentences morefrequently than their adult counterparts do, whether the target language allows it or not. Thus, they frequently produceutterances like want more apple instead of I want more apple (Eric 1;11; Bloom, 1970) or Spill instead of Mommy spilledthe juice (Allison 1;10; Bloom, 1970). Children speaking languages like English and German where subject omission is nottypically permitted, nonetheless, omit between 20% and 50% of subjects (compared to 5--10% omission by adults; e.g.,Bloom, 1990; Clahsen, 1991; Hyams and Wexler, 1993; Valian, 1991; Wang et al., 1992; Weissenborn, 1990, 1992).Children speaking languages like Inuktitut and Italian where subject omission is permitted typically omit 70% or more oftheir subjects (compared to 50--60% omission by adults; e.g., Valian, 1991; Skarabela and Allen, 2003).

Why do children over-omit subjects? Explanations for this phenomenon come from three main theoreticalperspectives: grammatical, performance, and discourse-pragmatic. Research from the first two perspectives has focusedalmost exclusively on languages like English and German where subject omission is not typically permitted, and hasattempted to explain why children omit subjects at all. Accounts from the generative grammatical tradition center on theidea that children have a slightly different grammar from that of adults, such that some syntactic constraints that aremandatory for adults are instead optional for children. This optionality of certain constraints allows subject omission to belicit for children. A wide variety of such constraints have been proposed including truncation (e.g., Rizzi, 1993/4, 2005),

* Corresponding author at: 104 A Windsor Drive, Framingham, MA 01701, USA. Tel.: +1 508 788 9267.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M.E. Hughes), [email protected] (S.E.M. Allen).

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M.E. Hughes, S.E.M. Allen / Journal of Pragmatics 56 (2013) 15--3016

underspecification (e.g., Hyams, 1996; Clahsen et al., 1996; Sano and Hyams, 1994; Wexler, 1998), and the null auxiliary(Boser et al., 1992). In contrast, accounts focusing on children’s performance (as opposed to competence) claim thatchildren have the same internal grammatical system as adults but have a much more limited processing capacity.Therefore, they omit subjects in conditions where the processing load is higher, such as in long utterances (e.g., Bloom,1990; Valian, 1991; Valian and Aubry, 2005; Freudenthal et al., 2007), or where subjects can be easily reduced, as inprosodically weak positions in the sentence (Gerken, 1991).

Research from the discourse-pragmatic perspective, however, has mainly focused on languages like Inuktitut andItalian where subject omission is permitted, and has attempted to explain why some subjects are omitted while others arenot. This approach has highlighted children’s sensitivity to the complexities of information flow in discourse, claiming thatchildren omit subjects that are accessible to their interlocutor through recency of mention in the discourse, joint attention tothe referent, etc. (e.g., Clancy, 1993; Allen, 2000; Serratrice, 2005; Skarabela, 2007a,b; Huang, 2011). Children thenoccasionally overestimate what is accessible, resulting in more subject omission for children than adults.

While numerous studies are available from the grammatical and performance perspectives on languages that prohibitsubject omission, there are far fewer from the discourse-pragmatic perspective, especially studies that solely focus onEnglish acquisition. In the present study, we fill this gap by exploring English-speaking children’s sensitivity to sixestablished accessibility features in producing referential forms with caregivers in naturalistic situations in their homes.This study will provide the basis for future detailed comparison of explanations for subject omission across theoreticalapproaches.

1.1. The discourse-pragmatic approach

The underlying theoretical basis for this study is the discourse-pragmatic assumption that both adults and children aremore likely to omit a subject in speech when its referent in the real world is prominent in and easily recoverable from thediscourse and/or physical context. This is consistent with Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Quantity which states that the speakershould be as informative as required but no more informative than needed: if the referent is already salient from context, itdoes not need to be expressed in speech.

For adults, there is ample literature showing that subject omission is strongly influenced by factors of information flowwithin discourse (e.g., Ariel, 1990, 2001; Bock and Warren, 1985; Chafe, 1987, 1996; Du Bois, 1985, 1987; Givon, 1983;Gundel et al., 1993; Prince, 1985). This work is broadly organized around the notion of the conceptual accessibility of areferent, defined as ‘‘the ease with which the mental representation of some potential referent can be activated in orretrieved from memory’’ (Bock and Warren, 1985, p. 50). Thus, a subject that is highly accessible in the information flow ofthe discourse is likely to be omitted in actual speech because it can easily be retrieved from memory.

A variety of discourse features have been shown to feed into what makes the referent of a subject accessible, asdiscussed at length in the literature just mentioned. These include the recency of prior mention of the referent in discourse,the number of other potential competitor referents in the immediate discourse context, the number of utterances that thereferent persists in the discourse after its initial mention, the extent to which the referent is the topic of current discourse,the degree to which the referent is the focus of attention in the physical context, the presence of the referent in the physicalcontext, the degree of animacy of the referent, the degree to which the referent is uniquely identifiable for all in a givensetting or social group (e.g., the sun, the floor, the queen, the boss, John), and the degree of imageability of the referent. Ingeneral, a highly accessible referent tends to be recently mentioned, with no competitors, persistent after initial mention,the topic of current discourse, the focus of attention of the interlocutors, present in the physical context, highly animate,uniquely identifiable, and highly imageable.

Ariel (1994:99) proposes that speakers ‘‘direct their addressees’ retrieval of the intended referents by signalling to themhow accessible those mental entities are’’ through the use of particular forms in speech to express those referents.Several researchers propose scales of forms in speech (e.g., zero anaphora, pronoun, demonstrative, full noun phrase)ordered by the degree of information about the referent provided in the form, indicating correspondence between eachform and the level of referent accessibility it is used to express (e.g., Ariel, 1990; Givon, 1983; Gundel et al., 1993). Themost accessible referents are typically realized by forms that provide very little information about that referent: zeroanaphora as well as agreement markers on the verb and unstressed or bound pronouns. Thus, an omitted subject signalsthat the referent is known because no information about that referent is provided in the linguistic expression. Therelationship is not completely straightforward, however. For example, speakers may sometimes choose a higherinformation form (e.g., a full noun phrase) for a highly accessible referent in order to combat the effect of natural decay or toreduce the possibility of interference from other possible referents.

Numerous studies have shown that children, like adults, are also sensitive to the complexities of information flow indetermining which subjects to omit in their speech. These include studies in at least eight languages where subjectomission is permitted -- Hindi (Narasimhan et al., 2005), Inuktitut (Allen, 2000; Allen and Schröder, 2003; Skarabela,2007a,b), Italian (Serratrice, 2005; Serratrice et al., 2004), Japanese (Guerriero et al., 2006; Mishina-Mori, 2007), Korean

M.E. Hughes, S.E.M. Allen / Journal of Pragmatics 56 (2013) 15--30 17

(Clancy, 1993, 1997), Mandarin (Huang, 2011), Spanish (Paradis and Navarro, 2003; Shin and Cairns, 2012) and Turkish(Gürcanli et al., 2007) -- as well as three languages where subject omission is largely prohibited -- English (Serratrice et al.,2004; Guerriero et al., 2006; Mishina-Mori, 2007; Graf, 2010; Campbell et al., 2000; Matthews et al., 2006), French (DeCat, 2004; Salazar Orvig et al., 2010a,b), and German (Wittek and Tomasello, 2005; Schmitz, 2007).

All of the studies have shown the same general pattern: that children tend to omit subjects more frequently when thereferent is accessible than when it is not. A total of nine different accessibility features have been investigated across thedifferent studies (Allen et al., 2008), although they are labelled and defined somewhat differently across studies. They areall derived from the features used in the adult studies mentioned earlier, but not all the features studied for adults havebeen studied for children, and not all studies have investigated the same features. The features are PRIOR MENTION(how recently a referent has been mentioned in speech), PHYSICAL PRESENCE (whether a referent is present in orabsent from the physical context of the interlocutors), DISAMBIGUATION (whether a particular referent has potentialcompetitor referents in the linguistic or physical context), ANIMACY (whether the referent is animate), JOINT ATTENTION(whether the speaker and listener are focused on the same referent while they are aware of each other’s attention),TOPICALITY (whether the referent is the focus of conversation), QUERY (whether the referent is the subject of or theresponse to a question), EXPLICIT CONTRAST (whether a contrast is made explicit or emphasized by the speaker), andPERSON (whether the referent is first/second vs. third person). All of these factors have been found to have a significanteffect on subject omission in one or more studies.

Analyzing languages that prohibit subject omission, as in the case of English, is of particular interest because subjectomission is ungrammatical with respect to the adult language and thus requires the most explanation. Since grammaticaland performance-based studies are mostly based on naturalistic data from monolingual speakers, the ideal paralleldiscourse-pragmatic-based study would also be based on naturalistic data from monolingual speakers and wouldinvestigate several already established features of discourse that signal accessibility. However, virtually all of the existingdiscourse-pragmatic studies on languages prohibiting subject omission focus on only one or two accessibility features(English: Graf, 2010; Guerriero et al., 2006; Gundel et al., 2007; Matthews et al., 2006; French: De Cat, 2004; SalazarOrvig et al., 2010a,b; German: Wittek and Tomasello, 2005)1 or they assess cross-linguistic influence in bilinguals ratherthan patterns in monolingual speakers (English-Spanish: Paradis and Navarro, 2003; English-Italian: Serratrice andSorace, 2003; Serratrice et al., 2004; German-Italian: Schmitz, 2007). Further, the only naturalistic study with monolingualEnglish-speaking children that looks at more than one accessibility feature (Serratrice et al., 2004) is based on transcriptdata taken from the CHILDES database rather than data for which the researchers had access to either audio or video.Features such as joint attention that are derived from the physical setting are quite difficult to assess in transcript data.

Therefore, despite a number of previous studies on English subject omission from the discourse-pragmatic perspective,there remains a significant need for an assessment of monolingual children’s sensitivity to several accessibility features,including ones relevant to the physical context, in a naturalistic setting. This study intends to fill that gap.

1.2. The present study

The present study is designed to fill the previously mentioned gap in the literature by investigating monolingualchildren’s sensitivity to six accessibility features when expressing referents in their naturalistic interactions with caregiversin a language that typically prohibits subject omission. Data from four monolingual English-speaking children are analyzedat two time points -- early in their acquisition (age 2;0--2;7) and towards the end of the subject omission period (3;0--3;1) --and compared to caregiver data. Videotaped data from naturalistic child-caregiver interactions are used to allow forreliable coding of a range of accessibility features based on context, and to allow for maximum comparability to studiesfrom other theoretical perspectives which also used naturalistic data. In addition to the main goal of determining howsensitive English-speaking children are to accessibility features, we also briefly touch on two other questions: whichfeatures have the strongest effect on referential choice and the cumulative effect of accessibility.

2. Method

2.1. Participants

Data for this study were taken from the Manchester-Max Planck Dense Database (Lieven et al., 2003, 2009).Participants were four monolingual English-speaking children: Annie, Brian, Eleanor, and Fraser. All the children lived

1 Salomo et al. (2010,2011) assess the role of Prior Mention and Perceptual Availability on referential choice for objects in German-speakingthree- and four-year-olds.


with their families in a large metropolitan area in England and came from middle-class backgrounds. Two of the children --Eleanor and Fraser -- were taped five hours per week for six weeks during the periods 2;0--2;1 and 3;0--3;1, while a thirdchild Annie was taped for 7 weeks from 2;0--2;1 and for three weeks from 3;0--3;1; The fourth child, Brian, was taped fivehours per week throughout the entire period 2;0--3;1. The five hours per week typically comprised one-hour sessions oneach of five different days, four of which were audiotaped and one videotaped. For our study, we used only the one hourper week per child recorded on videotape in order to analyze the utterances in the light of non-verbal aspects of theinteraction as well as the physical context.

2.2. Data

The children were videotaped in spontaneous interactions with their mother and/or a familiar researcher while taking partin such every-day activities as playing with toys and having snacks. All utterances spoken by and to the child were transcribedby research assistants in CHAT format (MacWhinney, 2000; see Lieven et al., 2003, 2009, for further details about themethod of recording and transcription). The transcripts and videotapes were kindly made available to us by Elena Lieven.Previous studies have shown that both proportion of subject omission and sensitivity to accessibility features change overtime (e.g., Hyams, 1986; Guerriero et al., 2006; Serratrice et al., 2004; Salazar Orvig et al., 2010a,b). Therefore, we analyzedutterances separately at the two available time points to assess development. Time 1 for three of the children comprised datafrom 2;0 to 2;1. One child, Brian, had a somewhat lower mean length of utterance (MLU) than the other three children duringthese earliest recordings. Since we also had later recordings for him, we used a slightly later set of data for his Time 1 -- from2;4 to 2;7 -- so that the linguistic level of all four children would be as comparable as possible. Time 2 for all four childrencomprised data from 3;0 to 3;1, by which point the children all have a similar linguistic level.

Only fully intelligible utterances containing a verb were coded for grammatical and discourse-pragmatic information. Thefollowing were excluded: exact self-repetition, imitation, recitation of poems or songs, frozen forms, and routines. Thus, atotal of 1901 utterances were coded from 25 files at Time 1 and 3177 utterances were coded from 21 files at Time 2.

A crucial part of our study is determining the effect of discourse-pragmatics on subject realization. Therefore, weexcluded from analysis all utterances in contexts where the omission or overtness of the subject is fixed and cannot varydepending on the accessibility of the referent for that subject. This comprised six types of contexts. First, all imperativeutterances were excluded (Time 1: 227; Time 2: 317). Subjects of imperatives must be omitted for grammatical reasons inEnglish, and thus are excluded as a matter of course in studies of subject omission in English.

Second, all utterances containing first and second person subjects were excluded (Time 1: 627 first person and 60second person; Time 2: 1194 second person and 278 second person2). First and second person subjects are, bydefinition, virtually always fully accessible in the discourse: they are animate, present in the discourse context, jointlyattended to, recently mentioned, and unambiguous. Because they do not vary in accessibility, they are not a good test ofwhether children are sensitive to accessibility features in their subject omissions and they can only be either null orpronominal, so the full range of realization cannot be observed.

Third, in earlier analyses of this data set (Hughes and Allen, 2006; Hughes, 2011), we found that both the children andthe adults often used proper names to refer to themselves or to their interlocutors as in the following examples:

(1)

2 At Tsignificomittedrespec

a.

ime 1antly h

16%tively)

Mommy doesn’t want any sugar.

, the children omitted subjects in 37% of aigher than the percentage of omitted third

of all first person subjects. This is sign, which show a more adult-like rate of om

(Mother of Annie)

ll first person utterance person subjects at Timificantly higher than thission.

[about herself]
b. Brian got a big job to do. (Brian, 2;04) [about himself]
This is a common feature of both child speech and child-directed speech in English and certain other languages (Snowand Ferguson, 1977; Gallaway and Richards, 1994; Hyams, 2008). Importantly, these proper nouns are grammaticallythird person, but pragmatically first and second person. Therefore, in order to make sure that these lexicalized, fullyaccessible subjects were not skewing the results in any way, they were removed from this analysis (Time 1: 48; Time 2:88). Fourth, all utterances were excluded in which the existence of JOINT ATTENTION could not be determined due to thepositioning of the video camera or movement out of frame by the participants (Time 1: 67; Time 2: 118).

Finally, utterances were excluded that contained either of two types of subjects that are virtually never omitted inEnglish: subjects that are explicitly contrasted with an alternative referent using stress or tone of voice (e.g., ‘This cup ismine and that cup is yours’), and subjects that are the referent of or the answer to a question (e.g., referent of question:‘What broke?’; answer to question: ‘The vase broke.’). These two features -- CONTRAST and QUERY -- have been used

s and 60% of all second person utterances. These percentages aree 1 (24%). At Time 2, the children omitted far fewer subjects but stille proportion of second and third person omissions (3% and 4%


Table 1Age, mean length of utterance in words, and number of 3rd person subject contexts produced by four children at Time 1 and Time 2.

Annie Brian Eleanor Fraser

Time 1 Age 2;0.4--2;1.22 2;4.17--2; 7.1 2;0.4--2;1.8 2;0.1--2;1.10Sessions 7 � 1 hour 6 � 1 hour 6 � 1 hour 6 � 1 hourMLU 2.15--2.45 1.88--2.22 1.68--2.17 1.35--1.74# of Subject Contexts (723) 306 157 81 179

Time 2 Age 3;0.4--3;0.18 3;0.1--3;1.27 3;0.0--3;1.15 3;0.0--3;1.11Sessions 3 � 1 hour 6 � 1hour 6 � 1 hour 6 � 1 hourMLU 3.12--3.42 2.5--3.11 2.17--2.49 2.25--2.65# of Subject Context (1028) 191 272 278 287

as accessibility features in previous studies of the effect of discourse-pragmatics on subject omission (e.g., Clancy, 1993;Allen, 2000). However, they are different from other features in being categorical: contrasting or questioning a subject inthis way necessitates rather than simply influences the use of an overt subject in English (Hughes and Allen, 2006;Hughes, 2011), so these utterances were excluded (Time 1: 25 contrastive utterances and 124 queries; Time 2: 57contrastive utterances and 97 queries). Excluding utterances with these two types of subjects from the analysis allowed usto achieve a more accurate picture by assessing only those features that truly allow for variation.

The final data set for analysis, then, included all third person subjects that were not explicitly contrasted or queried, andthat appeared in fully intelligible and non-imperative utterances. Table 1 gives the age, number and length of sessions, theMLU, and the number of possible subject contexts for each child at each of Time 1 and Time 2. For comparison purposes,15% of the utterances from each of the four mothers were randomly selected using the same criteria as outlined above forthe child files. This yielded a total of 1129 possible subject contexts.

2.3. Accessibility features

All third person subjects from both the child and mother data that fit the above criteria were coded for accessibility. Sixaccessibility features were selected for analysis, based on the nine that have been previously investigated in childlanguage studies (Allen et al., 2008). These are ANIMACY, CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION, PHYSICALPRESENCE, PRIOR MENTION, LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION, and JOINT ATTENTION. Note that DISAMBIGUA-TION was treated as two features for this study -- CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION and LINGUISTICDISAMBIGUATION -- because those two types of disambiguation have been shown to function differently in previousstudies (e.g., Allen, 2000). Thus, four of the nine previously studied accessibility features were not analyzed in this study.The reasons for excluding PERSON, EXPLICIT CONTRAST, and QUERY were already noted in section 2.2. The featureTOPICALITY was excluded because it is much more general than the other features and indeed subsumes several ofthem.

Each subject in the data was assigned a binary value for each feature based on how accessible its referent was in thediscourse context (e.g., Ariel, 2001; Clancy, 1993; Allen, 2000; Skarabela, 2007b).3 An accessible value indicates that thereferent is easily identified in the discourse context, so the speaker is likely to be less explicit in speech and possibly omitthe subject. An inaccessible value indicates that the referent is not easily identified in the discourse context, so thespeaker should be more explicit in speech and thus not omit the subject. Table 2 lists the six features and how accessibilityvs. inaccessibility was defined for each.

The following example illustrates how each subject was coded. In the interaction in (2), the mother and child are playingwith multiple blocks on the table. At the time of the final utterance, the mother is looking at and touching the block inquestion (Block B), and the child is also looking at it.

(2)

3 In rpeople1976).

featurebinary

MOT:

eality, th are conA similas as binvalues.

That block fell down. [referring to Block A]
MOT: Where does this block go? [referring to Block B] CHI: Ø go there. [referring to Block B] (Annie 2;0)
ese features are not binary but rather gradient in nature. For example, numerous hierarchies posit degrees of animacy in whichsidered more animate than animals, which are more animate than plants, which in turn are more animate than rocks (Silverstein,r gradient can be posited for the other five features as well. However, as it has been the practice in the literature to treat theseary in order to simplify the analysis and to allow for statistical analysis based on these values, the current study maintains the use of


Table 3Four referential forms - A hierarchy of accessibility markers.

Low Accessibility Marker

High Accessibility Marker

Lexical NP Boy go. (Brian 2;07.01)

Demonstrative This go round here. (Fraser 2;00.20)

Pronoun It goes there. (Annie 2;00.25)

Null Ø want chips. (Eleanor 2;00.15)

Table 2Accessibility features.

Accessibility Feature Accessible Value Inaccessible Value

ANIMACY (AN) Animate InanimateCONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION (CD) Only referent in physical context Multiple referents in physical contextPHYSICAL PRESENCE (PP) Physically present Physically absentPRIOR MENTION (PM) Given: mentioned within preceding

5 utterancesNew: not mentioned within preceding5 utterances

LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION (LD) No other possible referents in preceding5 utterances

Other possible referents in preceding5 utterances

JOINT ATTENTION (JA) Referent focus of attention for childand interlocutor

Referent not focus of attention for childand interlocutor

The (omitted) subject in the final utterance is coded as follows:ANIMACY. A block is inanimate. Because animate entities are particularly salient to children in the discourse context,

the subject which has an inanimate referent is coded as inaccessible.CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION. At the time of the utterance, the child is playing with several blocks, so there are

numerous other possible referents in the physical context that could fit the semantics of the verb and the grammaticalelements of the intended referent. Therefore, the subject is coded as inaccessible.

PHYSICAL PRESENCE. The block is physically present, and therefore more easily identified than if it were absentfrom the physical context. The subject is coded as accessible.

PRIOR MENTION. Any referent that has been mentioned in the preceding 5 utterances is considered accessible.4

Because the block referred to was just mentioned in the previous utterance, it is coded as accessible.LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION. There are two referents mentioned in the preceding five utterances that fit the

semantics of the verb and the grammatical elements of the referent, making it more difficult to identify. Therefore, thesubject is coded as inaccessible.

JOINT ATTENTION. The block is the focus of attention for both the mother and the child, and they are aware of eachother’s attention on the block. Thus the subject is coded as accessible.

2.4. Argument forms

In order to achieve a better understanding of the effects of discourse-pragmatics on subject choice, all third personsubjects in the analysis were categorized as one of four possible referential forms, based on Ariel’s accessibility theory (Ariel,2001). The central claim of accessibility theory is that adult speakers will choose a referential form based on the accessibilityof the referent. The four grammatical forms analyzed in this study are lexical noun phrases, demonstratives, pronouns, andnull forms. Table 3 demonstrates the hierarchy of these four forms. Lexical forms are low accessibility markers because theyare used by a speaker in situations when a referent is inaccessible, meaning that the speaker has to convey more informationin order to identify the referent. Conversely, null subjects, zero forms, are high accessibility markers because they mark that areferent is highly accessible in the discourse context, meaning that the speaker does not have to convey as much informationto identify the referent. In other words, the subject form signals the degree of accessibility of a referent. Demonstratives andpronouns fall somewhere in between lexical forms and null subjects in terms of accessibility. In many previous studies,demonstratives are ranked slightly higher than pronouns in terms of informational status, hence the ordering given in Table 3(see Ariel, 1990, 2001; Givon, 1983; Gundel et al., 1993 among others).

4 In their corpus of Inuktitut child speech, Skarabela and Allen (2003) determined that few arguments have preceding references more than 5utterances prior, showing that the difference between a cut-off of 5 versus 20 preceding arguments is minimal. They suggest that a threshold of 5previous utterances to encode a referent as new rather than given may be an appropriate distance for child spontaneous speech (Allen et al., 2008).


2.5. Analysis

The general hypothesis for this study is that the accessibility of each of the six previously defined discourse-pragmaticfeatures (i.e., ANIMACY, CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION, PHYSICAL PRESENCE, PRIOR MENTION, LINGUISTICDISAMBIGUATION, and JOINT ATTENTION) has a significant effect on the choice of referential form produced by thechildren. To determine whether this is the case, the data were analyzed in two ways.

First, the choice of referential forms for accessible vs. inaccessible referents was compared for each individual featurefor the caregivers as a group (section 3.1) and then for each child5 at Time 1 and Time 2 (section 3.2). As described earlier,each possible subject context in the data was assigned a binary value -- accessible or inaccessible -- for each of the sixaccessibility features. A two-way contingency table analysis was then conducted for each of the six predictors, withaccessibility (accessible, inaccessible) as the independent variable and form (null, pronominal, demonstrative, lexical) asthe dependent variable. Chi-square tests of independence were performed to determine whether there was a statisticallysignificant relationship between each of the predictors and the form of the subject. Second, in section 3.3, the cumulativeeffect of the six features was analyzed for each child by comparing the choice of form for those subjects whose referentsare fully accessible (i.e., accessible for all six features) vs. those subjects whose referents are fully inaccessible (i.e.,accessible for none of the six features).

3. Results

In the following three sections, we report the effect that the accessibility of the six previously defined discourse-pragmatic features has on the caregivers’ and children’s choices of referential forms.

3.1. The effect of individual features for the caregivers

Fig. 1 shows the results for the caregivers’ data for all four mothers combined. As is expected for adult speech, theoverall number and proportion of omitted subjects was quite small (i.e., 2% or less for accessible and inaccessible valuesof each feature). However, the distribution of the other three forms (pronoun, demonstrative, lexical) was found to besignificantly different for accessible vs. inaccessible referents for each of the six features, clearly demonstrating the effectof accessibility on the caregivers’ referential choice. When the values for the features were accessible, the caregiversproduced pronouns at a rate of 52--63% depending on the feature. When the values for the features were inaccessible,pronouns were produced at a much lower rate of 22--50% depending on the feature. Instead, demonstrative and lexicalforms were predominantly used for inaccessible referents. This finding supports the claim that demonstrative forms carrymore information than pronouns as has been suggested in previous studies (e.g., Ariel, 1990, 2001; Givon, 1983; Gundelet al., 1993; Hughes and Allen, 2006; Hughes, 2011).

While every feature shows highly significant differences between the forms chosen for accessible vs. inaccessibleforms, the feature PRIOR MENTION has the greatest effect in determining whether a pronominal versus a demonstrativeor lexical form is used. These results confirm results found in other studies demonstrating that adults’ production ofreferents is influenced by discourse-pragmatic features.

3.2. The effect of individual features for the children

Fig. 2a--d illustrates the results at Time 1 for each of the four children.6 Fig. 2a demonstrates that Annie produces morenull subjects and pronouns when referents are accessible for a particular feature and many more lexical forms whenreferents are inaccessible. This is a significant difference for five of the six features -- ANIMACY at the p ≤ .05 level, and

5 Although typically developing children go through corresponding stages of development and eventually achieve similar language ability, it hasbeen well-established that there is considerable variation between individual children in both the rate of acquisition and the cognitive strategiesthat each child applies to the task (Goldfield and Snow, 1997). Therefore, instead of reporting on the trends of the children as a group, we reporttheir individual results in order to exclude the possibility that one or two children are responsible for the patterns seen in the data.

6 The occasionally higher than expected proportion of lexical subjects for accessible referents can at least partially be explained by a commonfeature of child and child-directed speech in English. Both caregivers and children often repeat lexical forms for third person referents as in thefollowing example:

CHI: Butterfly has gone.MOT: Where has the butterfly gone? (Fraser, 2;01) [about a puzzle piece]

Because these examples represent true third person subjects, they were not removed from the analysis.


Fig. 1. Percentage of accessible and inaccessible subjects which are overt for each feature for adult caregivers. Feature key: ANIMACY (AN);CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION (CD); PHYSICAL PRESENCE (PP); PRIOR MENTION (PM); LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION (LD); JOINTATTENTION (JA). Total N of obligatory contexts for subjects = 1129; Total N overt = 1112. *Significant at the p ≤ .05 level; **significant at thep ≤ .01 level. (P values are indicated on both graphs for ease of reading.)

CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION, PHYSICAL PRESENCE, PRIOR MENTION, and JOINT ATTENTION at the p ≤ .01level. Brian also shows this pattern for five of the six features -- four of the same features as for Annie, and LINGUISTICDISAMBIGUATION instead of CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION (which was significant for Annie). However, Brianproduces very few pronouns and demonstratives in comparison to Annie (see Fig. 2b). Like Brian, Eleanor’s choice offorms for accessible versus inaccessible referents is significant ( p ≤ .05) for all features except CONTEXTUALDISAMBIGUATION (see Fig. 2c). Her data show a very clear pattern in which she produces many more lexical forms anddemonstratives when subjects are inaccessible. The data for Fraser in Fig. 2d do not demonstrate as clear a pattern as forthe other three children. For three of the features, PHYSICAL PRESENCE, PRIOR MENTION, and JOINT ATTENTION,he produces significantly more null forms when referents are accessible for these features and significantly more lexicalforms when they are inaccessible ( p ≤ .01). However, Fraser’s data show an unexpected result for the features ANIMACYand CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION. For these two features, Fraser actually produces significantly more null subjectsin inaccessible contexts. This finding does not match the patterns found for the other three children and requires furtheranalysis.

Overall, the children show sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic features at Time 1 and choose their referents accordingly.They omit a greater number of subjects when referents are accessible and produce more lexical forms anddemonstratives when referents are inaccessible. Moreover, the accessibility of three features - PHYSICAL PRESENCE,PRIOR MENTION, and JOINT ATTENTION - has a strong effect on referential choice across all four children.

Fig. 3a--d illustrates the results for each of the four children at Time 2. The patterns of referential choice here stronglyresemble those found for the caregiver data in Fig. 1: the number and proportion of pronouns has increased at Time 2 forall children, and there are very few null subjects overall (4%). In addition, and also similar to the child results at Time 1,accessibility for discourse-pragmatic features still plays a significant role in determining referential choice for all of thechildren. In Annie’s data (Fig. 3a), all six features are significant: ANIMACY, CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION,PHYSICAL PRESENCE, LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION, and JOINT ATTENTION at the p ≤ .01 level and PRIORMENTION at the p ≤ .05 level. This means that she produces significantly more pronouns when referents are accessiblefor these features, and significantly more lexical forms and demonstratives when referents are inaccessible for thesefeatures. Brian (Fig. 3b) also shows this pattern for four of the six features ( p ≤ .01). As at Time 1, he shows no significanteffect of accessibility on referential choice for CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION. For ANIMACY, he shows the oppositepattern to that expected: he produces more lexical forms for accessible than for inaccessible referents, and morepronouns for inaccessible than for accessible referents. As shown in Fig. 3c, Eleanor replicates the expected pattern for


Fig. 2. (a--d) Percentage of each form for each feature for accessible and inaccessible subjects for each child at Time 1. Feature key: ANIMACY(AN); CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION (CD); PHYSICAL PRESENCE (PP); PRIOR MENTION (PM); LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION (LD);JOINT ATTENTION (JA). Total N of subjects = 775; Total N overt = 576. *Significant at the p ≤ .05 level; **significant at the p ≤ .01 level.(a) Percentage of each form for each feature for accessible and inaccessible subjects for Annie at Time 1. Total N of obligatory contexts forsubjects = 306; Total N overt = 277. (b) Percentage of each form for each feature for accessible and inaccessible subjects for Brian at Time 1.Total N of obligatory contexts for subjects = 157; Total N overt = 92. (c) Percentage of each form for each feature for accessible and inaccessiblesubjects for Eleanor at Time 1. Total N of obligatory contexts for subjects = 81; Total N overt = 65. (d) Percentage of each form for each feature foraccessible and inaccessible subjects for Fraser at Time 1. Total N of obligatory contexts for subjects = 179; Total N overt = 92.


Fig. 3. (a--d) Percentage of each form for each feature for accessible and inaccessible subjects for each child at Time 1. Feature key: ANIMACY(AN); CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION (CD); PHYSICAL PRESENCE (PP); PRIOR MENTION (PM); LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION (LD);JOINT ATTENTION (JA). Total N of subjects = 1091; Total N overt = 1044. *Significant at the p ≤ .05 level; **significant at the p ≤ .01 level.(a) Percentage of each form for each feature for accessible and inaccessible subjects for Annie at Time 2. Total N of obligatory contexts forsubjects = 191; Total N overt = 184. (b) Percentage of each form for each feature for accessible and inaccessible subjects for Brian at Time 2.Total N of obligatory contexts for subjects = 272; Total N overt = 250. (c) Percentage of each form for each feature for accessible and inaccessiblesubjects for Eleanor at Time 2. Total N of obligatory contexts for subjects = 278; Total N overt = 265. (d) Percentage of each form for each featurefor accessible and inaccessible subjects for Fraser at Time 2. Total N of obligatory contexts for subjects = 179; Total N overt = 92.


Fig. 4. Cumulative effect of accessibility for six features distributed across four forms for caregivers for fully accessible and fully inaccessiblereferents only. *Significant at the p ≤ .05 level; **significant at the p ≤ .01 level. Total N fully accessible subjects = 99; Total N for fully inaccessiblesubjects = 19.

five of the features: ANIMACY, PHYSICAL PRESENCE, PRIOR MENTION, LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION, andJOINT ATTENTION are significant at the p ≤ .01 level. She produces null forms and pronouns at a rate of 70% and higherwhen referents are accessible for each of the six features. Like Brian, she shows no significant effect of accessibility onreferential choice for CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION. The pattern for Fraser in Fig. 3d is almost identical to that forEleanor.

The children at Time 2 all show the same general tendency to produce more pronouns when referents are accessibleand more lexical forms and demonstratives when referents are inaccessible. While their choice of referents is more adult-like at Time 2 in that they omit fewer subjects than at Time 1, there are still some individual differences. In particular, Brianstill seems to rely quite heavily on lexical forms even in accessible contexts, while the other three children are expandingtheir repertoire of forms by producing many more pronominal and demonstrative forms than at Time 1. Moreover, for allfour children, four features are highly significant in determining their choice of referent. When the features PHYSICALPRESENCE, PRIOR MENTION, LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION, and JOINT ATTENTION are accessible the childrenproduce null subjects or pronouns at a rate of between 45% and 85% depending on the child, and when these features areinaccessible, they produce null subjects or pronouns at a much lower rate of between 17% and 50%.

3.3. Cumulative effect of features

The final analysis focused on the cumulative effect of features. Although the features so far have been treated asthough they can be assessed independently from each other, this is almost certainly not the case. Children undoubtedlypay attention to several or all the features at once when they are determining what referent to produce. One way toinvestigate this cumulative effect of features is to compare subjects whose referents are accessible for all six features withthose whose referents are inaccessible for all six features. The hypothesis in this case is that the fully accessible subjectsare much more likely to be omitted in speech or to be produced as pronouns than the fully inaccessible subjects, and thatfew if any of the fully inaccessible subjects would be omitted.

The results of the caregivers’ data for all four mothers combined in Fig. 4 match the prediction above. When referentsare fully accessible, 67% of the forms produced by the adults are pronouns; whereas, for fully inaccessible referents, only5% of the forms produced are pronouns and 95% are lexical NPs. This difference is highly significant and demonstratesthe cumulative effect of discourse-pragmatic features on the adults’ choice of referential forms.

As Figs. 5 and 6 demonstrate, the data bear out this prediction for the children at both age ranges as well. At Time 1, thechildren realize fully accessible subjects with either a null form or a pronoun at a rate of between 46% and 100% depending onthe child, and only one child realizes fully accessible subjects with lexical NPs. In contrast, inaccessible subjects are realizedas pronominal subjects at a rate of only between 0% and 50% depending on the child, and as lexical NPs at a rate of between50% and 100% (see Fig. 5). At Time 2, all four children omit subjects at a much lower rate (between 0% and 12%). Instead,they realize fully accessible subjects predominantly as pronouns, at a rate of between 35% and 100%. When subjects arecompletely inaccessible for all six features at Time 2, there are no omissions and subjects are realized as lexical NPs at a rateof between 50% and 100% (see Fig. 6). Although there are some individual differences, the children show substantialsensitivity to the cumulative effect of discourse-pragmatic features when producing a referent at both Time 1 and Time 2.


Fig. 5. Cumulative effect of accessibility for six features distributed across four forms at Time 1 for each child for fully accessible and fully inaccessiblereferents only. Feature key: ANNIE (AN); BRIAN (BR); ELEANOR (EL); FRASER (FR). *Significant at the p ≤ .05 level; **significant at the p ≤ .01level. Total N fully accessible subjects: AN = 2; BR = 2; EL = 2; FR = 22. Total N for fully inaccessible subjects: AN = 23; BR = 7; EL = 2; FR = 2.

Fig. 6. Cumulative effect of accessibility for six features distributed across four forms at Time 2 for each child for fully accessible and fully inaccessiblereferents only. Feature key: ANNIE (AN); BRIAN (BR); ELEANOR (EL); FRASER (FR). *Significant at the p ≤ .05 level; **significant at the p ≤ .01level. Total N fully accessible subjects: AN = 13; BR = 17; EL = 55; FR = 8. Total N for fully inaccessible subjects: AN = 3; BR = 11; EL = 3; FR = 7.


4. Discussion

This study set out to determine whether accessibility as revealed through six accessibility features could explain thepatterns of selection of argument form in naturalistic interactions between English-speaking children and their mothers.The effect of the features was examined individually and in relation to each other. In line with previous studies, weexpected that the children would omit subjects more at the earlier stage of development (Time 1) than at the later stage(Time 2) regardless of accessibility factors, and that the children would omit subjects more than their adult caregivers. Wealso predicted that discourse-pragmatic features would have an effect on the production of referential forms for thechildren at both developmental stages as well as for their caregivers. That is, although the children at Time 1 and Time 2might not be completely adult-like in their choice of argument form, a referent’s accessibility status in the discourse contextwould still play a major role in whether the children chose to realize a referent as a null subject, a pronoun, a demonstrativeor a lexical NP. However, the question remained as to whether all six features would have an effect on subject realizationand whether children would show sensitivity to the cumulative effect of the features (e.g. if several features are accessiblefor a given referent).

As expected, the omission of third person subjects decreased significantly with age. The children at Time 1 (age 2;0--2;7) omitted more than five times as many subjects as the children at Time 2 (age 3;0--3;1) -- 27% vs. 5% -- who in turnomitted more than twice as many subjects as the adults -- 5% vs. 2%. These findings fit the developmental trajectory foundin many other studies in English and other languages, demonstrating that at around age 3;0 or at an MLU of 3.0, children’somission of subjects drops sharply to approach the rate of subject omission in the target language (e.g., Bloom, 1990;Clahsen, 1991; Hyams and Wexler, 1993; Skarabela and Allen, 2003; Valian, 1991; Wang et al., 1992; Weissenborn,1990).

Next, the six features were tested to determine their individual effect on subject realization in terms of whether thereferent would be omitted or realized as a pronoun, demonstrative, or lexical NP. For the caregivers, the accessibilityversus the inaccessibility of all six features was found to be significant in determining the choice of referent. For thechildren at Time 1, there were some differences in the significance of the six features for each child; however, for all fourchildren, the accessibility of three features was found to be highly significant in determining the form of the subject:PHYSICAL PRESENCE, PRIOR MENTION, and JOINT ATTENTION. Although the choice of referential form differedsomewhat at Time 2 compared to Time 1 (i.e., more pronominal subjects were produced and fewer omissions occurred),the findings as to the significance of features were similar. The same three features, PHYSICAL PRESENCE, PRIORMENTION, and JOINT ATTENTION, and one other, LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION, were shown to be significant indetermining the choice of referent based on their accessibility values.

Overall, the results indicate that the features PHYSICAL PRESENCE, PRIOR MENTION, and JOINT ATTENTION arethe most powerful and persistent of the six accessibility features studied here. This jibes well with results demonstratingthe powerful effect of these features in other naturalistic (e.g., Guerriero et al., 2006; Huang, 2011; Hughes and Allen,2006; Narasimhan et al., 2005; Salazar Orvig et al., 2010a,b; Serratrice, 2005; Skarabela, 2007a,b) and experimentalstudies (e.g., Campbell et al., 2000; Matthews et al., 2006). However, this is the first study, naturalistic and experimental,to consider all three features at once focused solely on a language where subject omission is not permitted.

Finally, an analysis of the cumulative effect of the features showed that all three groups were sensitive to the effects ofaccessibility in the discourse context. For the caregivers, when referents were fully accessible for all six features, theyproduced pronouns at a rate of 67% and omitted subjects at a rate of 1%. When referents were fully inaccessible, only 5%of the forms produced by the adults were pronouns and there were no omitted subjects. For each of the four children atTime 1, 46--100% of all subjects were omitted or were pronominal (null: 0--100%; pronominal 0--50%) when referents werefully accessible. When referents were fully inaccessible, 0--50% of all subjects produced were pronominal and no subjectswere omitted. At Time 2, 0--12% of all subjects were omitted and 35--100% of all subjects produced were pronominal whenreferents were fully accessible for all six features. For fully inaccessible subjects, only 0--15% were pronominal while 50--100% were lexical NPs.

Taken together, these results suggest that English-speaking children are indeed sensitive to a range of accessibilityfeatures in determining their production of referential forms in naturalistic interactions with their mothers. This is consistentwith findings from earlier experimental studies (Campbell et al., 2000; Matthews et al., 2006; Graf, 2010) and naturalisticstudies of English-speaking monolingual children focusing on only one or two accessibility features (Guerriero et al., 2006;Mishina-Mori, 2007), as well as with findings from naturalistic studies analyzing more than two accessibility features butbased on transcript data and focusing on bilingual rather than monolingual children (Serratrice et al., 2004; Paradis andNavarro, 2003). However, by testing a full set of six accessibility features in videotaped data produced by monolingualchildren acquiring a language that does not permit null subjects, the results also underline the cross-linguistic applicabilityof sensitivity to accessibility features: the patterns found here for English are very similar to the patterns found in otherstudies with languages which allow subject omission. Moreover, this study demonstrates preliminary results as to thecumulative effect of accessibility indicating a rich area for further research.


It is clear from these findings that the children’s sensitivity to the relationship between accessibility features andreferential form improves with age: they become more adult-like in their selection of referential forms, selecting pronounsinstead of null forms and correctly mapping demonstrative and lexical forms to less accessible referents. This studydemonstrates that children, although they begin by using a large number of (ungrammatical) null forms, are appropriatelyhoning and applying their sensitivity to the discourse context by using their developing mapping skills to determinewhether a subject should instead be realized as a pronoun, a demonstrative, or a full noun phrase. This development inturn suggests a sharpening of the child’s awareness and ability to take the perspective of the other into account whenengaged in dyadic interaction with an interlocutor. Further studies should investigate more fully the relative strength offeatures and how features work together in predicting the selection of appropriate referential forms.

In sum, the positive findings in this study demonstrate that even two-year-olds have a basic understanding that theinformation status of referents does matter and that they are sensitive to the knowledge of their interlocutors.

Acknowledgements

We thank Elena Lieven of the Max Planck Child Study Center and the Max Planck Institute for EvolutionaryAnthropology for so generously sharing the videotapes and transcripts of the children’s data with us, and Jeannine Goh ofthe Max Planck Child Study Center for answering numerous questions about the data and transcriptions. This study wasfunded by National Science Foundation grant BCS-0346841 to Shanley Allen.

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Mary E. Hughes completed her Ph.D. in 2011 in Applied Linguistics at Boston University. Her dissertation focused on the interaction of syntacticand discourse-pragmatic effects in the acquisition of reference in an attempt to shed light on the early development of referential choice in dyadicconversation. Currently, she is a Lecturer at Boston University. Her research interests include the integration of competence-based and discourse-based linguistic approaches in order to show the range of factors at work in L1 acquisition. She has also done research on the acquisition of IrishGaelic, and is interested in minority language revitalization.

Shanley E.M. Allen received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She has published extensively on theacquisition of argument realization, the acquisition of morphosyntax and narrative by Inuktitut-speaking children, the coordination of speech andgesture in motion events across typologically different languages, and code mixing in bilingual preschool children. She is Co-Editor of the bookseries Trends in Language Acquisition Research published by Benjamins, and is on the Editorial Board of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition,International Journal of Language Sciences, and Journal of Child Language.






















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