Abstract
The present study focuses on the development of Spanish pronominal processing. We investigate whether the pronoun interpretation problem (i.e., reflexive pronouns comprehension is resolved at an earlier age than that of personal pronouns, also known as the Delay of the Principle B Effect), which has been documented in other languages, also occurs in Spanish. For this purpose, we conducted two experiments including pronoun resolution tasks. In Experiment 1, a task adapted from the experimental paradigm proposed by Love et al. (J Psycholinguist Res 38:285–304, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-009-9103-9) was used, which examines the off-line processing of the Spanish pronouns se and le. In Experiment 2, on-line processing of the same pronouns was evaluated with eye-tracking, using a paradigm developed by Thompson and Choy (J Psycholinguist Res 38:255–283, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-009-9105-7). Forty-three participants aged 4–16 years completed both experiments. Results indicated that there is no developmental asymmetry in the acquisition of successful resolution of the two types of anaphora in Spanish: from age 4, reflexive and clitic pronouns are processed with the same degree of accuracy.
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Acknowledgements
This study was conducted thanks to the funding received from the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness (Grant Number PSI2015-65656-P). The authors wish to thank all the participants who participated in the study for their collaboration, as well as M. José Tirado and Miriam Cerezo for their assistance in collecting the data.
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Rodríguez-Ortiz, I.R., Moreno-Pérez, F.J., Delgado, P. et al. The Development of Anaphora Resolution in Spanish. J Psycholinguist Res 48, 797–817 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09632-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09632-3