Personal Pronouns and Verb Person Inflections: Relations with Linguistic Development and Social Understanding
Abstract
The acquisition of personal pronouns, especially first and second person forms, is often challenging for children: they replace them with proper names, make reversal errors, or use the first- and second-person forms interchangeably. This difficulty might be due to the linguistic as well as the social and psychological aspects of person reference.
The study examined relations between early mastery of pronouns and various measures of social understanding and language development in 66 30-month-olds acquiring Czech. Pronoun elicitation as well as comprehension tasks were used.
In addition, the comprehension of first- and second-person verb inflections was tested. To examine social understanding, we used tasks assessing cooperation, perspective taking and pretend play.
The results show that both language development and social understanding contribute to the comprehension and production of person reference, both in pronouns and in verb conjugation.