The Comprehension and Production of the Anaphoric Pronouns "He, She, Him, Her" in Normal and Linguistically Deviant Children. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, No. 4

Research was conducted to study systematically the comprehension and production of the pronouns "he, she, him, her" in the language of normal and linguistically deviant children. The purposes of the study were to: observe the manner in which normal children comprehend and produce these four pronouns, in terms of both their use and their distinctive features of sex and case; compare these results with similar phenomena in linguistically deviant children; and determine the general systematic stages of pronoun development. Thirty linguistically normal and thirty linguistically deviant children were tested. Each subject was asked to perform one comprehension and one production test involving the use of four dolls: father, mother, son, and daughter. Responses were tape-recorded and transcribed. Three main classes of errors emerged: errors of gender, of reference, and of both gender and reference. Errors of gender and reference were most prevalent in the normal group; errors of gender reversal were most common in the deviant group. Other findings included: (1) females in both groups tended to make fewer errors than males; (2) generally, high performance on comprehension tasks was accompanied by high performance on production tasks; (3) generally, comprehension task scores were equal to or greater than those received on production tasks; and (4) the deviant group performance fell well below the normal group performance. (AM)