Testing children’s knowledge of generic null pronouns

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss an experiment conducted with children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as their native language. The experiment was designed to test if Brazilian children understand that the null subject in impersonal structures has the generic reading in BP instead of the referential one. The experiment consisted of a Truth-Value Judgement Task (TVJT). The results show that children as young as 4 years of age understand the null subject in impersonals as generic. Based on a study showing that a 2-year-old child acquiring Estonian already produces null impersonals (TORN-LEESIK; VIJA, 2012), it is possible that children acquiring BP correctly assign the generic reading to a null pronoun in impersonal constructions before the age of 4. I propose that this knowledge could be tested in children younger than 4 using the Intermodal Preferential-Looking (IPL) paradigm (GOLINKOFF et al.,1987; NAIGLES; TOVAR, 2012), a method more suitable than the TVJT to test children that are very young. --- Original in English.

Keywords

• generic null pronoun, impersonal structures, language acquisition