The influence of prominence cues in 7- to 10-year-olds’ pronoun resolution: Disentangling order of mention, grammatical role, and semantic role

In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to SVO or OVS sentences containing active accusative verbs (küssen “to kiss”) in Experiment 1 (N = 72), or dative object-experiencer verbs (gefallen “to like”) in Experiment 2 (N = 64). This was followed by the personal pronoun er or the demonstrative pronoun der. Interpretive preferences for er were most robust when high prominence cues (first mention, subject, proto-agent) were aligned onto the same entity; and the same applied to der for low prominence cues (second mention, object, proto-patient). These preferences were reduced in conditions where cues were misaligned, and there was evidence that each cue independently influenced performance. Crucially, individual variation in age predicted adult-like weighting preferences for semantic cues (Schumacher, Roberts & Järvikivi, 2017).