Hampshire College
Psychology of Language
Introduction
Consider the following statement: “You asked me to go to the store to pick up some eggs for grandma. I picked them up for her.” For a normal adult speaker of English, this sentence is completely comprehensible; furthermore, it is a statement that would be easily and naturally produced. However, imagine that you are an alien with no understanding of English. Your English-speaking companion makes this statement, helpfully pointing at you when she says “you”, herself when she says “me” and “I”, and grandma when she says “her”. After a few conversations like this, you think you have gotten the hang of English. Walking up to your companion (who is sick at home) after giving grandma a ride, you proudly state: “You drove grandma to the store. Her picked up some eggs for her. Oh! Are I sick? You hope me get better!”
From a theoretical standpoint, pronouns should be hard, and it is remarkable children can use them properly. When using pronouns, one must decide what
1. person & gender to use (are you talking about yourself [1st Person]: “I/me/my/mine”; to someone else [2nd Person]: “you/your/yours”; or about someone else entirely [3rd Person]: “he/him/his/she/her/hers/it/its”? In regards to 3rd Person, is the referent a person [“he/she”] or an object [“it’], and is it male or female?)
and what
2. case to use (what function does the pronoun have in the sentence? Is the sentence about something the referent does [Nominative, Subjective]: “I/you/he/she/it”; something that is being done to the referent [Objective]: “me/you/her/him/it”; describing something as the property of the referent [Adjectival Genitive] or naming it as such [Nominal Genitive]: “my/your/his/her/its” or “mine/your/his/hers/its”; or something the referent is doing to itself [Reflexive]: “myself/yourself/himself/herself/itself”)
and whether you are talking about one person or thing or more than one person or thing. You must also realize that although you can freely interchange 3P pronouns and names, it is not acceptable to refer to yourself or the person you are talking to by name (Chiat, 1986).
The issues that will be focused on in this paper are those related to shifting reference, pronoun reversal, and the use of names or pronouns amongst typically developing children and children with autism.
Shifting reference
Most words name things: more importantly, they always name the same thing. A table is a table, Mr. Jones is Mr. Jones, the teacher is the teacher, regardless of whether you are talking, your friend is talking, you are reading a book, etc. One thing might have multiple names, or one name might signify multiple things, but the meaning of the name does not change depending on who is speaking (Clark 1978; Fay and Schuler, 1980; Ricard et al., 1999). Children learning a language must comprehend, through some means, that the person the words “you”, “I”, or “me” refer to changes depending on who is speaking to whom (Bates, 1990; Chiat, 1986; Clark, 1978; Ricard, Girouard, and Gouin-Decarie, 1999). How do children understand these rules? This question has intrigued psycholinguists for some time in regards to the light in might show on the connections between language, the conceptions of self and other, and theory of mind. Charney (1980) noted three ways in which children might understand pronouns: speech-role referring, person referring, and person-in-speech-role-referring. In a role-referring understanding, the child correctly understands the pronouns to refer to different members of the discourse depending on who is speaking. This understanding requires that the child have some sort of non-egocentrism, allowing it to take the point of view of others. In a person-referring understanding, the child understands the pronouns as a sort of name (see below). In a person-in-speech-role understanding, the child learns the pronouns most relevant to itself. The child understands pronouns in relation to the child’s own speech roles, i.e., it understands that “I” refers to it when it is speaking, but may not understand that “I” refers to others when they are speaking. This last theory is the one Charney supports.
Pronoun use by typically developing children
A natural assumption would be that children, on hearing themselves referred to as “you” and their parents referring to themselves as “I”, would assume that these terms are a type of name (Clark, 1976): our alien in the introduction made precisely this type of error. The child would assume that it is “you” and either its parent or adults in general are “I”. This phenomenon has been referred to as “pronoun reversal” (although “nonreversal” might be a more accurate term [Fay and Schuler, 1980; Fay, 1982], as the error in fact stems from the child not reversing pronouns to accommodate speaker roles). Interestingly, pronoun errors of this type are rare; even more interestingly, despite their rarity they are still found amongst typically developing children, often enough to be well documented in the literature (Clark 1978; Cruttenden, 1977; Chiat, 1986). According to Bates “it is quite common at age twenty to twenty-four months for a child to say ‘carry you/hold you/help you’ to mean ‘carry me/hold me/help me’” (1990). Cooley (1908) noted in a diary study that his third daughter would use “she” and “I” to refer to herself from the age of 1;11-2;3, such as in the statement “I carry you”, expressing the desire to be carried. Inconsistent reversals were also noted, such as “I want to take a walk with me”. Chiat (1981) performed a case study in 3 sessions with the subject, Matthew. The sessions took place at ages 2;4.16, 2;4.24, and 2;5.11, and Matthew’s comprehension and production were tested, the latter naturalistically in the 2nd session and with some attempts to elicit pronouns in the third. In the second session, Matthew’s use of 1P pronouns was usually correct, but he almost never used the correct pronoun for the addressee, as in the examples “I cry”=you’ll cry. This was particularly true in possessive contexts, such as “That my umbrella”=that’s your umbrella. 2P pronouns were used to refer to himself, as in “You’ll cry”=I’ll cry. Also, pronouns were occasionally inconsistent, with both the correct and incorrect forms used in a single utterance, similarly to Cooley’s observations. In the 3rd session, reversals of pronouns in regards to the addressee were still present, but had become rare, with Matthew often correcting himself. Despite these errors in production, Matthew’s performance on tests of comprehension was perfect. In a cross-sectional and longitudinal study by Loveland (1984) a correlation was found between mastery of different spatial points of view and pronoun errors, with some reversal errors observed amongst those children who did not understand different points of view. These errors often happened in contexts where the child was asked a question and repeated the pronoun used, e.g. “What do I have?” “I have cup”. Errors in comprehension were noted. Jordan (1989), in a comparison of autistic, typical, and mentally handicapped children, noted errors made by a few of the typical children in comprehension and production, with two typical children misunderstanding “you” as referring to the speaker and 3 children making errors in the production of “you”, one of them also making an error in the production of “me”. Oshima-Takane’s (1992) case study followed a pronoun reversing child, David, from age 1;11-2;10. The data they collected were his performance on comprehension tasks, 45-minute to 2 hour samples of his speech, and information from interviews with his mother and babysitter. At age 1;11 David’s mother had noticed that he was making consistent pronominal errors. At that time, he would use 1P pronouns to refer to the addressee 94% of the time and 2P pronouns to refer to himself 100% of the time. By the age of 2;10 his errors had almost completely disappeared. However, the development of the correct use of 1P and 2P pronouns was significantly different: while the error rate for 1P pronouns declined regularly between the 2;4-2;10, the error rate for 2P pronouns remained pretty much constant until 2;8, dropping dramatically between 2;8 and 2;10. In regards to comprehension, up until 2;4 he understood “you” as referring to himself even when he wasn’t the one being addressed. Oshima-Takane attributed David’s errors to a lack of experience with people using pronouns when talking to each other and not to him, making it difficult for him to generalize. Fraiberg and Adelson (1977) noted that blind children, capable in all other respects, often reversed pronouns well into their 5th year, which she attributed to the difficulties of forming a concept of self without the visual modality. And, in perhaps the most striking example of pronoun reversal, a deaf child was noted to make reversal errors in pointing, even interpreting all “you” signs as referring to herself (Bates 1990)!
However, as stated before, pronoun errors are exceedingly rare amongst typically developing children (Huxley, 1970; Charney, 1980). Much more commonly, children will use names instead of pronouns. This might reflect a confusion about pronouns that causes the child to avoid them altogether, as evidenced by the fact that children who use names master pronouns more quickly when they begin to use them (Bates, 1990)—suggesting these children were using the time to work out what pronouns actually mean. It might also be caused by the fact that the nominal style is what the child often hears, as parents will often use names in order to effectively get the child’s attention (Chiat, 1986; Bates, 1990). Interestingly, there seems to be a distinction in the child’s use of names vs. pronouns when they use both, where the name refers to the physical body and the 1P pronoun to the self as an actor (Cooley, 1908).
Autism and personal pronouns
Whereas pronoun reversal is rare amongst typically developing children, amongst autistic children it is common enough that it is often considered pathognomic of the disorder (Jordan, 1989; Hobson, 1990). As Kanner wrote (qtd. in Lee et. Al., 1994):
Personal pronouns are repeated just as heard, with no change to suit the altered situation. The child, once told by his mother “Now I will give you your milk,” expresses the desire for milk in exactly the same words. Consequently, he comes to speak of himself always as “you,” and of the person addressed as “I”.
What Kanner described here is the phenomenon of echolalia, where the autistic child associates statements with the situation as they, the child, perceive it, and not with the parent’s mental state or intentions (Charney, 1981; Hobson, 1990). It is also possible that the child’s errors may be traced to their difficulties in gestural behavior and joint attention (Fay and Schuler, 1980).
Autistic difficulties with pronouns are well documented in the literature (Fay and Schuler, 1980). Jordan (1989) found that while errors were rare amongst typical and mentally handicapped children, 9 out of the 11 autistic children made the maximum number of possible errors in the experiment in the production of both 1P and 2P pronouns. 3 of these children made pronoun reversals. The autistic children were also much more likely to use a name instead of “you”, while their results for names vs. pronouns in referring to themselves were more scattered. One child used her name 3 times and the experimenter’s names 7 times for “you”, with the numbers being reversed for “me”, indicating confusion about identity. Lee et al. (1994) found, in preparation for their study, that teachers reported several cases of pronoun reversal amongst autistic students, such as the student who told a teacher on return from sick leave “I’m better now”. Lee et al. (1994), in comparing autistic children with other mentally disabled children, found a tendency amongst autistic children to use proper names instead of the pronouns “I”, “me”, and “you”, that was not found amongst the other children. There was also a tendency to use the pronoun “I” instead of “me”. There were however no significant cases of pronoun reversal, although two autistic subjects did respond to the question “who can see X?” with the response “I can’t” as opposed to “you can”. Strangely, though, one of the subjects who had performed capably throughout the experiment said, on leaving, “Thank you for seeing you, Tony”. Lee et al. interpreted these results to a lack of a sense of “me-ness” or “you-ness”: the autistic subjects, according to their interpretation, lacked the sense of self (and other) as actor that Cooley (1908) had described. This also could explain why those autistic subjects who performed well could still experience occasional lapses, and their use of names for pictures of themselves and others.
Proposal for future studies
The fact that pronominal errors are rare amongst typically developing children means that systematic, large-scale experiments have rarely been done. Most information on personal pronoun difficulties has come, instead, from detailed case studies. Strangely, though, I did not encounter such case studies in regards to autistic children. I propose that such a study be performed, testing both production and comprehension. Diary studies such as Cooley’s (1908) would also be insightful. This would allow for a comparison between the pronoun use of otherwise typically developing children with pronominal errors and autistic children with pronominal errors. As the cognitive reasons for the errors made by autistic children are fairly easily understood but the cognitive reasons that some children should reverse pronouns when they have the same capabilities as their peers are not, such a comparison could shed light on the latter. For example, it could distinguish whether the reasons for pronoun errors amongst typically developing children are primarily cognitive or based on abnormal experience of pronoun use (as Oshima-Takane [1992]) suggests. It would also give a more in depth understanding of autistic pronouns.
References
Bates, E. (1990). Language about me and you: pronominal reference and the emerging
concept of self. In, D. Cicchetti and M. Beeghly (Eds.), The Self in transition:
infancy to childhood (165-182). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Charney, R. (1980). Speech roles and the development of personal pronouns. Journal of Child Language, 7, 509-528.
Charney, R. (1981). Pronoun errors in autistic children-support for a social explanation. British Joumal of Disorders of Communication, 15(1), 39-43.
Chiat, S. (1981). If I were you and you were me-the analysis of pronouns in a pronoun- reversing child. Journal of Child Language, 9, 359-379.
Chiat, S. (1986). Personal pronouns. In, P. Fletcher and M. Garman (Eds.), Language acquisition: studies in first language acquisition, 2nd Ed. (339-355). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, E. (1978). From gesture to word: on the natural history of deixis in language acquisition. In, J. Bruner and A. Garton (Eds.), Human growth & development: Wolfson College Lectures, 1976 (85-120). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cooley, C. H. (1908). A study of the early use of self-words by a child. The Psychological Review, 15(6), 339-57.
Cruttenden, A. (1977). The acquisition of personal pronouns and language 'simplification'.
Language and Speech, 20(3), 191-197.
Fay, W.H., & Schuler, A. L. (1980). Emerging language in autistic children. Baltimore: University Park Press.
Fraiberg, S. & Adelson, E. (1977). Self-representation in language and play. In, S. Fraiberg, Insights from the blind (248-270). New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Hobson, R. P. (1990). On the origins of self and the case of autism. Development and Psychopathology, 2, 163-181.
Huxley, R. (1970). The development of the correct use of subject personal pronouns in two children. In, G. B. Flores d'Arcais & W. J. M. Levelt (Eds.), Advances in psycholinguistics. New York: American Elsevier Publishing Company, Inc.
Jordan, R. R. (1989). An experimental comparison of the understanding and use of speaker-addressee personal pronouns in autistic children. British Journal of Disorders of Communication, 24, 169-179.
Lee, A., Hobson, R., & Chiat, S. (1994). I, you, me, and autism: An experimental study.
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 24(2), 155-176.
Loveland, K. A. (1984). Learning about points of view- spatial perspective and the acquisition of 'I/you'. Journal of Child Language, 11, 535-556.
Oshima-Takane, Y. (1992). Analysis of pronominal errors-a case study. Journal of Child Language, 19, 11-131.
Ricard, M., Girouard, C. P., & Gouin-Decarie, T. (1999). Personal pronouns and perspective taking in toddlers. Journal of Child Language, 26, 681-697.
Posts
