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Individual differences in pronoun reversal: Evidence from two longitudinal case studies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2011

KAREN E. EVANS  and
KATHERINE DEMUTH
KAREN E. EVANS*
Affiliation:
Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota
KATHERINE DEMUTH
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University
*
Address for correspondence: Karen E. Evans; e-mail: snavenerak@gmail.com
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Abstract

Pronoun reversal, the use of you for self-reference and I for an addressee, has often been associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and impaired language. However, recent case studies have shown the phenomenon also to occur in typically developing and even precocious talkers. This study examines longitudinal corpus data from two children, a typically developing girl, and a boy with Asperger's syndrome. Both were precocious talkers who reversed the majority of their personal pronouns for several months. A comparison of the children's behaviors revealed quantitative and qualitative differences in pronoun use: the girl showed ‘semantic confusion’, using second person pronouns for self-reference, whereas the boy showed a discourse–pragmatic deficit related to perspective-taking. The results suggest that there are multiple mechanisms underlying pronoun reversal and provide qualified support for both the Name/Person Hypothesis (Clark, 1978; Charney, 1980b) and the Plurifunctional Pronoun Hypothesis (Chiat, 1982).

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 162 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

We thank Meghan Patrolia for data and reliability coding, as well as Jae Yung Song, Rachel Theodore and members of the Brown Child Language Lab for comments and discussion. We also thank our participants and their families for contributing to the Providence Corpus.

References

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