comprehension of reﬂexive and personal pronouns in

Applied Psycholinguistics 34 (2013), 813–835doi:10.1017/S0142716412000033

Comprehension of reflexiveand personal pronouns in childrenwith autism: A syntacticor pragmatic deficit?

ALEXANDRA PEROVICUniversity College London

NADYA MODYANOVA and KEN WEXLERMassachussetts Institute of Technology

Received: April 25, 2010 Accepted for publication: July 22, 2011

ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCEAlexandra Perovic, Developmental Science Department, Division of Psychology and LanguageSciences, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACTAlthough pragmatic deficits are well documented in autism, little is known about the extent to whichgrammatical knowledge in this disorder is deficient, or merely delayed when compared to that oftypically developing children functioning at similar linguistic or cognitive levels. This study examinesthe knowledge of constraints on the interpretation of personal and reflexive pronouns, an aspect ofgrammar not previously investigated in autism, and known to be subject to differential developmentalschedules in unimpaired development. Fourteen children with autism (chronological age = 6–17 years,M = 11) showed some difficulties comprehending personal pronouns, no different from those observedin two groups of younger controls matched on nonverbal IQ or receptive grammar, but in line with thereported pragmatic deficits and general language delay in this population. However, their interpretationof reflexives was significantly worse than that of the control children. This pattern is not evidencedat any stage of typical development, revealing an impaired grammatical knowledge in our sample ofchildren with autism, and is argued not to be due to a general language delay or cognitive deficits.

Deficits in language and communication are known to be one of the definingcharacteristics and diagnostic criteria of autism (American Psychiatric Associ-ation, 2000). Individuals with autism form a rather heterogeneous group withrespect to their language abilities, which range from mutism and little functionalcommunication to relatively well-developed language. A common characteristicof these individuals, however, is that they all share impairments in pragmatic andconversational skills.

Less is known about grammatical development in this population. It has beenargued that it follows the same path as that in typically developing (TD) children

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Applied Psycholinguistics 34:4 814Perovic et al.: Comprehension of reflexive and personal pronouns in children with autism

matched on mental age (MA), although at a slower rate (Lord & Paul, 1997; Tager-Flusberg, 1981; Tager-Flusberg et al., 1990). However, some results reported inboth early and very recent research seem to suggest otherwise. Early studies re-vealed difficulties in the use of grammatical morphology in spontaneous speech ofchildren with autism, not dissimilar to those seen in children with developmentaldysphasia, or specific language impairment (SLI; Bartolucci, Pierce, & Streiner,1980; Churchill, 1972). Difficulties with grammatical morphemes marking tense(e.g., “John goes,” where the verb is correctly marked for tense vs. the incor-rect “John go”) and present progressive (“John is going”) have been confirmedmore recently (Eigsti & Bennetto, 2009; Roberts, Rice, & Tager-Flusberg, 2004).Using a computational measure introduced in accounts of the optional infinitivestage (difficulties in marking the finiteness of verb; Wexler, 1993) in TD andSLI children, Roberts et al. (2004) reported that performance of children withautism was poorer than expected for their general level of both linguistic andcognitive development, indicating a specific morphosyntactic deficit in this pop-ulation. Note that difficulty with tense marking is argued to be a reliable clinicalmarker of SLI (Rice & Wexler, 1996). These findings are particularly interestingin view of reports suggesting a genetic link between autism and SLI (Fombonne,Bolton, Prior, Jordan, & Rutter, 1997; Tomblin, Hafeman, & O’Brien, 2003; Verneset al., 2008), as well as a recent claim that the two disorders could even be ona continuum (Bishop, 2003a). Mapping out a detailed linguistic profile in thepopulation with autism is crucial to both establishing reliable differences betweenautism and other developmental disorders, such as SLI, as well as understand-ing the heterogeneity of the grammatical abilities of individuals on the autismspectrum.

However, there is little consistent data on the comprehension of complex syntac-tic structures. Research on grammar in autism traditionally entails investigationsof spontaneous speech and analyses of results obtained by standardized tests oflanguage abilities. Although these methods generate a wealth of important data,contexts in which complex grammatical structures are produced are often limited,thus failing to give a reliable picture of an individual’s competence. In additionto the studies reporting difficulties with verb inflection mentioned earlier, thefew experimental studies of complex grammar suggest that passives (Perovic,Modyanova, Hanson, Nelson, & Wexler, 2007; Tager-Flusberg, 1981) and relativeclauses (Riches, Loucas, Charman, Simonoff, & Baird, 2009) also seem suscepti-ble to impairment, as well as some operations at the syntactic/semantic/pragmaticinterfaces, such as marking of definiteness (Modyanova, 2009).

The lack of consensus on the issue of whether grammar in autism is simply de-layed or also deviant, coupled with a scarcity of studies implementing experimentalmethods, calls for investigations of formal aspects of grammar in this population inmore depth. The aim of our study is to investigate binding in children with autism.Binding is the area of grammar that concerns constraints on the distribution ofpersonal and reflexive pronouns. There is no previous experimental research inthis area in the population with autism; however, difficulties with using personalpronouns in spontaneous speech have been reported (Lee, Hobson, & Chiat, 1994).Like young TD children, children with autism have been found to interpret youas I, and vice versa. This phenomenon, termed pronoun reversal, is argued tobe due to their difficulties with shifting reference and to general problems with


pragmatics. Nothing is known about how children with autism interpret personalversus reflexive pronouns. Experimental research on typical development reportsspecific difficulties in the interpretation of personal but not reflexive pronouns:even after 6 years of age, TD children frequently interpret sentences involvingpersonal pronouns such as Mary washes her to mean Mary washes herself. Thisrobust phenomenon, termed the delay of Principle B effect (DPBE; to be discussedin more detail in the following section) has been explained by appealing to thedistinct nature of the principles that guide the interpretation of reflexive as opposedto personal pronouns: reflexives are interpreted by relying on constraints that arepurely syntactic in nature, whereas personal pronouns are regulated by both syn-tactic and extrasyntactic (i.e., pragmatic) constraints. Syntactic constraints are inplace early, but the development of pragmatic constraints takes time (Thornton &Wexler, 1999; Wexler & Chien, 1985); thus, the pattern in typical developmentis understood as being due to TD children’s prolonged maturation of pragmaticand not syntactic principles. In view of reported errors in production of personalpronouns and general difficulties in pragmatics and understanding of intention inautism, an in-depth investigation of the knowledge of constraints regulating theinterpretation of both reflexive and personal pronouns in this population seemsparticularly pressing. If language in autism is delayed, but develops in a fashionparallel to typical development, a similar, or even more exaggerated, pattern ofdifficulties with pronouns is expected, in line with reported pragmatic deficits inthis population. However, if syntactic knowledge is also affected, children mayshow difficulties interpreting reflexives that cannot be accounted for by a simplelanguage delay. The following section outlines the theory of binding, its acquisitionin the typical populations, and spells out the predictions for children with autism,thus providing a rationale for our study.

CONSTRAINTS GOVERNING PERSONAL AND REFLEXIVEPRONOUNS IN TYPICAL ACQUISITION

Our implicit knowledge of the constraints involved in assigning reference leads usto interpret the reflexive pronoun, herself, as referring to only one of the femalecharacters mentioned in sentence (1a) below: Susan. To be interpreted as herself,the noun phrase (NP) Susan (its “antecedent”), has to be “nearest” to the reflexive.The index next to an NP refers to the referent of the NP.

(1) a. Maryi says that Susanj likes herselfj.b. Maryi says that Susanj likes heri.

The personal pronoun her, in (1b), is interpreted as referring to Mary, the NP“furthest away” from the pronoun.

The facts of the distribution of reflexive and personal pronouns have beencaptured in structural terms by the binding principles of Chomsky (1986),1 givenin (2).

(2) a. Principle A: a reflexive must be locally bound.b. Principle B: a pronoun must be locally free.2


As stated above, the binding principles describe the complementary distribution ofreflexives and pronouns. This is illustrated in (3a) and (3b): Principle A forces thereflexive to corefer with Mary in (3a), whereas Principle B excludes coreferenceof pronoun and Mary in (3b).

(3) a. Maryi adores herselfi/∗j

b. Maryi adores her∗i/j

Being part of the computational aspects of our linguistic knowledge, compliancewith binding principles is expected to be seen early on. Knowledge of Principle A,which demands that a reflexive have a local antecedent in the sentence, is acquiredby TD children at least by age 4 (Chien & Wexler, 1990; Jakubowicz, 1984; Wexler& Chien, 1985). In Wexler and Chien (1985), structure (4) was tested with the aidof a two-choice picture task in 129 children, aged 2 years, 6 months (2;6) to 6;6(and adult controls). Their performance grew with age; 6-year-olds gave greaterthan 90% correct performance (chance is 50%).

(4) Cinderella’s sister points to herself.

Note that when tested on the constructions above, young children also show theirunderstanding of the c-command component of binding, as possessives allow fortwo potential antecedents of the relevant pronominal element: one c-commanding(the entire NP, “Cinderella’s sister”), the other non-c-commanding (the genitive NP“Cinderella”). Possessive NPs are argued to appear early in typical development(Tomasello, 1998), at least by age 4 (Bannard & Matthews, 2008; Golinkoff &Markessini, 1980); thus, any difficulties with these constructions should to bedue to children’s incomplete mastery of the binding principles, and not of thepossessive NP.

In contrast, at around the same age, TD children have a great deal of troublewith constructions that involve personal pronouns:

(5) Cinderella’s sister points to her.

In the context of a forced-choice task (where one picture shows the sister point-ing to Cinderella, and the other picture shows the sister pointing to herself), thesentence in (5) cannot mean that Cinderella’s sister pointed to the sister, but mustmean that she pointed to Cinderella. Wexler and Chien (1985) report that in thetwo-choice picture task, children 5.5-year-old children (the same children who dovery well in reflexives) were still around chance, and performance increased to lessthan 60% for the 6-year-olds. This robust pattern, termed DPBE, has been repli-cated in a number of studies for English (Avrutin & Thornton, 1994; Boster, 1991;Chien & Wexler, 1990; Thornton & Wexler, 1999) and has also been observedcrosslinguistically (e.g., Dutch: Philip & Coopmans, 1996; Hebrew: Friedmann,Novogrodsky, & Balaban, 2010; Icelandic: Sigurjonsdottir, 1992; Russian: Avrutin& Wexler, 1992). Acquisition of binding has been one of the most fertile areas inthe field of language acquisition (for a review, see Guasti, 2002) and the famous


phenomenon of DPBE is still debated in the literature, two decades on. It has beennoted that very young children may not show the difference in their performanceon reflexives versus pronouns (such as 2.5-year-olds in Wexler & Chien, 1985,or the 3-year-old Hebrew speakers in Ruigendijk, Friedmann, Novogrodsky &Balaban, 2010), and that the pattern may be more robust in comprehension thanin production (Bloom, Barss, Nicol, & Conway, 1994; Hendriks & Spenader,2005/2006; but see Ruigendijk et al., 2010, for data in Hebrew and German thatpresent an argument against the asymmetry in comprehension and production).

What is it that children do not know about the principles that constrain the use ofpronouns? Chien and Wexler (1990, followed by other researchers) argued that thisresult is due to the different nature of constraints governing personal pronouns,as opposed to reflexives. Binding principles, as given in (2), regulate syntacticbinding only, where the bound item is a bound variable. Reflexives are subjectto syntactic binding only. Pronouns can be ambiguous between a coreferentialand a bound variable reading3: when a bound variable, they are regulated byPrinciple B, but when interpreted coreferentially, they are subject to constraintsthat are nonsyntactic in nature (pragmatic, according to Chien & Wexler, 1990,or subject to a special rule of coreference, as argued by Grodzinsky and Reinhart,1993).4 Children thus have the knowledge of Principle B, the constraint governingthe bound variable interpretation, but their difficulties with pronouns are due tolimitations in implementing nonsyntactic constraints that govern illicit corefer-ence. Chien and Wexler (1990) argue that the high rate of errors in accepting thecoreferential reading of (5) should be interpreted as a pragmatic error (failure of“Principle P”).5 It is important that the same study reports additional experimentaldata confirming that children are sensitive to the distinction between binding andcoreference. In contexts where a coreferential reading is not available, that is,when pronouns are bound by quantified antecedents, children show no difficultiesrejecting an ungrammatical sentence such as (6).

(6) ∗Every beari is washing heri.

This is because quantifiers, like other operators, have no definite referents andaccidental coreference is not an option: there is no ambiguity and no chance forchildren to fail. The same 5- to 6-year-old children in Chien and Wexler who showa chance performance on structures where the pronoun refers to the referentialantecedent, reached 84% correct performance on constructions involving a quan-tified antecedent. These findings have been confirmed in other languages (Russian:Avrutin & Wexler, 1992; Dutch: Philip & Coopmans, 1996) where children havebeen shown to accept illicit coreference between a pronoun and a local referentialantecedent.6

PREDICTIONS FOR CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

The result that TD children as old as 6 are still missing some crucial pragmaticabilities (while the related aspects of grammar have been acquired) provides an


important opportunity to test hypotheses concerning language abilities in autism.We formulate these hypotheses as follows:

1. If only pragmatic, but not syntactic knowledge is affected in autism, childrenwith this disorder will show difficulties in interpreting personal but not reflexivepronouns, displaying a pattern parallel to unimpaired development. An even moreexaggerated pattern of difficulties with personal pronouns might be expected inautism compared to unimpaired development, in view of reported language delaysin this population.

2. If, however, syntactic knowledge is also affected in autism, children may showdifficulties interpreting reflexives, because interpretation of these elements isguided by principles that are purely syntactic in nature. A pattern of a worseperformance on reflexives as opposed to, or in addition to pronouns, would be asign of deviance, and cannot be accounted for by a simple language delay becauseit is not evidenced in the course of typical acquisition.

In the ensuing sections, we present a study of the knowledge of binding inchildren with autism, aged 6–17. This age range was chosen to account for anyinitial delays in language development in this population. Following Wexler andChien (1985), whose task was successfully used with over 100 English-speakingTD children, we aim to also test the knowledge of the c-command part of PrinciplesA and B in our participants, by using a possessive subject that introduces botha c-commanding and a non-c-commanding local antecedent to the reflexive orpersonal pronoun in question. Testing c-command is important because failuresof interpretation could be due to failures in calculating c-command or to moregeneral binding principle failures. To examine any effects of verbal as opposed tononverbal abilities in the population with autism, our participants were carefullymatched to TD controls on standardized measures of verbal and nonverbal abilities.Binding principles have never been investigated in children with autism before,nor have the possessive structures; thus, we hope that our investigation will fill animportant gap in the literature with respect to comparing the grammar in autismto that of TD children.

METHOD

Participants

Forty-five children, 18 clinically diagnosed with autism and 27 TD controls, wererecruited for the study. The children with autism, aged 6;6–17 (M = 11;6), wererecruited with the help of Children’s Hospital Boston and autism parent supportgroups in Massachusetts. Four autistic children (7- to 10-year-olds) were excludedfrom this group as they were unable to complete the test battery; thus, the completeset of data was obtained from 14 participants with autism (of which 3 were girls).Their overall IQ, as measured by the Kaufman Brief Test of Intelligence (KBIT;Kaufman & Kaufman, 1990), ranged from 40 to 98 (M = 64.38, SD = 20.55; cf.Table 1). Their scores on different standardized measures reveal some disparity


Table 1. Ages and mean (standard deviation) scores on standardized tests oflanguage and cognition for the group with autism and two control groups

Group

Autism KBIT-TD TROG-TD(n = 14) (n = 13) (n = 14)

Age (months) 133.63 (43.36) 71.31 (20.12) 49.79 (6.93)Age range (months) 78–206 48–112 40–60KBIT

Composite SS 64.38 (20.55)Vocabulary SS 67 (22.59)Matrices SS 65.93 (20.37) 100.00 (6.76)Matrices RS 15.93 (5.86) 16.85 (4.58)

PPVT-IIISS 56.57 (15.81)RS 67.50 (16.26)

TROG-2 99.91 (9.92)SS 56.50 (4.05)RS 3.57 (2.76) 3.64 (2.71)

Note: The scores for the measures on which participants with autism were matchedto controls are in bold. KBIT, Kaufman Brief Test of Intelligence; TD, typicallydeveloping; TROG, Test for Reception of Grammar, Second Edition; SS, standardscore; RS, raw score; PPVT-III, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition.

between nonverbal and verbal abilities, but these differences did not prove tobe statistically significant: on the Matrices subtest of KBIT, which measuresnonverbal IQ, their mean standard score (SS) was 65.93 (SD = 20.37); on thePeabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition (PPVT-III; Dunn & Dunn, 1997),the test of receptive vocabulary, the mean was 56.57 (SD = 15.81); and on theTest for Reception of Grammar, Second Edition (TROG-2; Bishop, 2003b), theirmean score was 56.50 (SD = 4.05). It may be noted that these children’s scoresappeared uniformly poorer on TROG as opposed to PPVT: 12 out of 14 childrenwere at floor on TROG, whereas 4 out of 14 children were at floor on PPVT.

Unimpaired controls, aged 3–9, were recruited from day care centers and schoolsin Boston, Massachusetts, and were individually matched to children with autismon the raw scores of one of the two measures: the matrices subtest of KBIT (nomore than 1 point off), and TROG-2 (no more than 1 point off), thereby formingtwo control groups: KBIT-TD and TROG-TD, respectively. The inclusion of thetwo different measures of nonverbal and verbal abilities allowed us to factor outthe influence of general cognition and of general grammar ability on participants’performance on the particular syntactic structures under investigation. The TROG-TD control group consisted of 14 children, whereas the KBIT-TD group had 13: 1child with autism scored particularly low on KBIT; thus, no match could be foundfor him among our typical controls. Independent sample t tests confirmed that therewere no statistically significant differences between the raw scores of the group


with autism and either of the two control groups on the relevant matching measure.Participants were closely matched for gender: this match was exact in the autismversus KBIT control group, and fairly close in the autism versus TROG group,where 11 out of 14 autistic participants were matched with controls for gender.All participants were native speakers of standard American English dialect.

Procedure

Comprehension of personal and reflexive pronouns was investigated with the aidof a two-choice picture selection task, adapted from Wexler and Chien (1985). Tomake sure that all participants understood the procedure, great care was taken tointroduce the task, the characters used in the experimental pictures (the Simpson’sfamily: Mom, Dad, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie), and the verbs depicting differentactions used in the experimental sentences (dress, wash, point to, and touch).

The task was first piloted with two children with autism and two children withWilliams syndrome, aged 3–6, all with varying degrees of intellectual impairment.A similar version of this task, with the identical procedure but testing a differentsyntactic construction, was successfully used in another experiment in our lab,with 198 TD children, aged 3–14. The pictures of the five cartoon characters wereintroduced on the laptop screen individually, for example, “This is Mom, this isDad, this is Lisa, etc.,” followed by practice items that tested the child’s familiaritywith each one: the child would be asked to point to the character that matches thename uttered by the experimenter (e.g., Lisa, while the screen shows two pictures,one of Lisa, one of Marge, Lisa’s mom). This was followed by the introductionof four verbs used in the experimental pictures: dress, wash, point to, and touch,and finally, by two practice items involving simple transitive constructions: “Momkisses Dad” and “Bart holds Lisa.” The correct answers to all the practice itemsand experimental items alternated between pictures presented on the left and rightside of the screen, to control for any visual bias. The task was administered toten unimpaired adults whose performance was at ceiling. All the controls and the14 participants with autism (excluding the aforementioned four participants withautism who were for this reason excluded) were able to follow the task instructionsand successfully completed the introductory items, before the experimental probewas presented to them.

Stimuli

The probe consisted of two experimental conditions involving reflexive (namereflexive [NR]) and personal pronouns (name pronoun [NPr]) and two controlconditions involving no pronouns but just proper names (control possessive [CP]and control name [CN]). The complete list of sentences is provided in Table 2.

Possessive subjects (“Bart’s dad”) were chosen over simple noun phrases(“Homer”), because possessive structure allows for two potential antecedents ofthe reflexive or pronoun in the experimental conditions: the possessor NP “Bart,”and the entire subject NP consisting of the possessor and possessee, “Bart’s dad.”This way, the child has the choice of two local antecedents, one c-commandingthe dependent, the other not.


Table 2. The complete list of sentences in each test condition

1. Name reflexive Bart’s dad is touching himself.Lisa’s mom is touching herself.Bart’s dad is pointing to himself.Lisa’s mom is pointing to herself.Bart’s dad is washing himself.Maggie’s mom is washing herself.Maggie’s mom is dressing herself.Lisa’s mom is dressing herself.

2. Name pronoun Bart’s dad is touching him.Lisa’s mom is touching her.Bart’s dad is pointing to him.Lisa’s mom is pointing to her.Bart’s dad is washing him.Maggie’s mom is washing her.Maggie’s mom is dressing her.Lisa’s mom is dressing her.

3. Control name Bart is pointing to Dad.Lisa is touching Mom.Bart is washing Dad.Mom is dressing Maggie.Dad is pointing to Bart.Mom is touching Lisa.Mom is washing Maggie.Mom is dressing Lisa.

4. Control possessive Bart’s dad is licking a lamp post.Lisa’s mom is waving a flag.Bart’s dad is petting a dog.Maggie’s mom is petting a dog.Lisa’s mom is driving a car.Lisa’s mom is playing with blocks.Bart’s dad is eating an ice cream.Maggie’s mom is eating an ice cream.

Participants were asked to point to one of the two pictures presented on thelaptop computer that matched the sentence uttered by the experimenter. Thus,a sentence “Bart’s dad is washing him” (NPr) would be accompanied by twopictures: Picture A, depicting Homer, Bart’s dad, washing himself, with Bartstanding by, and Picture B, the correct answer, where Homer is washing Bart.

The same two pictures would be used for the reflexive sentence (NR), “Bart’sdad is washing himself,” where the correct answer is the aforementioned Picture A.In the control condition CP, which contained no pronominal elements, a sentencesuch as “Bart’s dad is petting a dog” would be accompanied by two pictures:Picture A showing Bart petting a dog, and Picture B showing Homer, Bart’s dad,petting a dog (the correct answer). CP sentences tested whether children knewthe structure of possessive NPs: whether they knew that the structure “Bart’s dad”refers to Bart’s dad and not, say, to Bart, which is the first NP in the sentence.


If children did well on this control condition, then any problems they have withbinding could not be the result of misunderstanding the possessive structure.Furthermore, as is also the case for control condition CN (to be described next), ifchildren did well on this control condition, it shows that they can perform well inthis experiment when binding is not involved. Control condition CN contained nopossessive structures and no pronominal elements: for example, the sentence “Dadis pointing to Bart” would be accompanied with Picture A showing Homer, Bart’sdad, pointing to Bart (the correct answer), and Picture B showing Bart pointing toHomer, his dad.

There were eight sentences in each condition (two for each of the four verbs inthe experimental conditions), thus totaling 32 sentences. The order of sentenceswas automatically randomized for each participant. The test took about 10 min tocomplete.

The majority of the participants with autism were tested in their homes, butseveral were tested in their schools. TD controls were all tested at their daycarecenters or after school clubs.

RESULTS

Because the outcome variable was binary, and involved repeated measures for eachparticipant in each of the three groups, the data were analyzed using the generalizedlinear mixed model function with a logit link (Gelman & Hill, 2007). Mixedlogistic regression models have been argued to be more suitable for analyzing datain psycholinguistic research than commonly used repeated measures analyses ofvariance (e.g., Jaeger, 2008; Quene & van den Bergh, 2008).

The fixed effects built into the model were Group (autism group and the twocontrol groups: KBIT-TD and TROG-TD), sentence (NPr, NR, CP, and CN), andGroup × Sentence interaction.7,8

The model revealed significant main effects of group, F (2, 152) = 16.62, p <.001, sentence type, F (3, 152) = 10.13, p < .001, and significant Group × SentenceType interaction, F (6, 152) = 3.20, p = .005. To investigate the Group × SentenceType interaction, post hoc contrasts (Sidak corrected) compared mean probabilitycorrect of each sentence type both between the groups and within the groups.Variables were considered to be statistically significant at the adjusted level ofp = .05. Mean probabilities correct for each sentence type and each group aredisplayed in Figure 1.

The significant Group × Sentence Type interaction indicates different patternsof performance between the three participant groups. The performance of the twoTD control groups did not differ on any of the sentence types. All the differencesobserved concerned the performance of the group with autism relative to that ofthe controls.

With regard to the control conditions, estimated mean probabilities correct ofthe group with autism on CN (M = 0.80, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.70,0.88) and CP (M = 0.77, 95% CI = 0.62, 0.87) were no different from those ofthe TROG group: CN (M = 0.89, 95% CI = 0.80, 0.94), t (152) = 1.57, p =.224, and CP (M = 0.86, 95% CI = 0.72, 0.93), t (152) = 1.06, p = .455,respectively. The other control group, KBIT-TD, had generally higher scores on


Figure 1. The results of the study. KBIT, Kaufman Brief Test of Intelligence; TD, typicallydeveloping; TROG, Test for Reception of Grammar; CP, control possessive; CN, control name;NPr, name pronoun; NR, name reflexive.

the control conditions (CN: M = 0.95, 95% CI = 0.87, 0.98; CP: M = 0.93, 95%CI = 0.80, 0.98). The autism group’s performance on CN was significantly worsethan that of KBIT-TD controls, t (152) = 2.88, p = .014; odds ratio = 4.75, butonly approached significance on CP, t (152) = 2.16, p = .093; odds ratio = 3.97.

With regard to the experimental conditions, comparisons of mean probabilitiesrevealed no differences between the groups on NPr (autism group M = 0.67, 95%CI = 0.54, 0.74; KBIT-TD group M = 0.71, 95% CI = 0.60, 0.80; and TROG-TDgroup M = 0.71, 95% CI = 0.61, 0.80): autism versus KBIT-TD: t (152) = 1.02,p = .671, and autism versus TROG-TD: t (152) = 0.96, p = .671.

However, the performance of the autistic group on NR (M = 0.43, 95%, CI =0.31, 0.55) was significantly worse than those of both control groups (KBIT-TD,M = 0.92, 95% CI = 0.82, 0.97; and TROG-TD, M = 0.83, 95% CI = 0.71, 0.90):autism group versus KBIT group: t (152) = 6.88, p < .001, odds ratio = 15.24,and autism group versus TROG group: t (152) = 5.10, p < .001, odds ratio =6.48.


The analysis also allowed for comparisons between the performances on thefour different sentence types for each group individually. Comparisons of meanprobabilities correct between the four sentence types within the autism grouprevealed the score on NR to be significantly lower than that of every other sentencetype: CP, t (152) = 3.76, p = .001; CN, t (152) = 4.86, p < .001; and NPr, t (152) =2.65, p = .035. No other differences between sentence types in the autism groupwere observed.

Within the KBIT-TD control group, the differences were significant betweenthe NPr and every other sentence type: CP, t (152) = 3.45, p = .003; CN, t (152) =4.29, p < .001; and NR, t (152) = 3.46, p = .003. No other differences betweensentence types were observed.

Within the TROG control group, the only statistically significant differencebetween means was between NPr and CN, t (152) = 3, p = .019.

That the autism group performed worse on the control condition CN, a simplesubject–verb–object sentence, than the KBIT-TD group, may raise concerns suchas whether these children were able to understand the task, and whether themain result, the extremely poor performance on NR of the autism group, wasdue to those autistic children who showed difficulties with this control condition.There were five children with autism who scored five out of eight correct on thiscondition (all other children, including all the controls, reach at least six out ofeight correct).9 Even when these five children are excluded and the analysis rerun,the results remain the same: the difference on NR is the only observed differencebetween the autistic group and the two control groups: autism versus KBIT-TD,t (132) = 5.49, p < .001, and for autism versus TROG-TD, t (132) = 4.42, p <.001.

The control condition CP was crucial in revealing whether or not childrenunderstand the notion of possessive structures, independently of their performanceon pronouns or reflexives. The children with autism showed a slightly lower butnot statistically significantly different performance from that of controls. Therewere several children overall who scored low on CP: three autistic children (one8-year-old who scored none of the possible eight correct, one 17-year-old who gotthree of eight correct, and one 6-year-old who scored five of eight correct) andfour control children (two 4.5-year-olds who scored four of eight correct, and two3.5-year-olds who scored five of eight correct). A separate analysis was run withall these children excluded, and results were identical to those reported above:the autism group showed no difference from the controls on any condition exceptNR: autism versus KBIT-TD, t (124) = 6.10, p < .001, and for autism versusTROG-TD, t (124) = 4, p < .001.

In order to get a better idea of the patterns revealed in the data on experimentalconditions, we also report the number of children who scored at least six out ofeight items correct on NR and NPr conditions in the autism group as opposedto the controls. On NR, only two children out of 14 in the autism group passedthe threshold of six of eight correct (14% of the sample); the other 12 childrenscored between one and five correct. In contrast, there were 23 out of the total of27 control children (85% of the sample) who reached at least six of eight correcton NR; the other four control children all scored five of eight correct on thisexperimental condition. With regard to the NPr condition, 15 control children out


of 27 (56% of the sample) scored six of eight or more correct, whereas 5 outof 14 autistic children (36% of the sample) did so. Note that the two childrenwith autism mentioned above, who showed the good performance on NR, alsoshowed a poorer performance on NPr (less than six of eight correct), which is apattern parallel to TD controls. Their general language abilities, as reflected intheir scores on standardized tests, were in line with those of other children in thegroup (cf. Table 1 for average scores of the autism group on different standardizedmeasures): both children had an SS of 55 on TROG, and SSs of 50 and 58 onPPVT. On KBIT, the measure of nonverbal IQ, one child’s SS was 63 and theother’s 84, the latter score almost in the average range. It is unlikely, however,that the SS of 84 on KBIT contributed to this child’s ability to interpret reflexivescorrectly: there were other autistic children whose standard scores on some of themeasures were also close to or even within the normal range (e.g., two childrenhad KBIT SSs of 98 and 103, and three different children had PPVT SSs of 80,80, and 87) but who still performed poorly on the reflexive condition.

DISCUSSION

Here we summarize the patterns revealed in the performance of the group withautism and the two groups of matched TD controls, and argue that the results ofour sample of children with autism signal the presence of a particular grammaticaldeficit in this population. We discuss a possible account of this deficit and examinethe general implications that these results have for our understanding of the studyof language in autism and the linguistic theory of binding.

The results shown by our TD controls are in line with those widely reportedin the literature for this chronological age range (3- to 9-year-olds), as reviewedin earlier sections. Children in the older control group, KBIT-TD (average age =6), showed a worse performance on pronouns, NPr (M = 0.71) and a very goodperformance on reflexives, NR (M = 0.92), displaying a classic DPBE pattern.The younger TROG-TD control group (average age = 4) showed no statisticallysignificant difference between their performance on the two conditions (NPr: M =0.71, and NR: M = 0.83). The lack of differential performance on reflexives andpronouns in this control group parallels the pattern reported in Ruigendijk et al.(2010) for 3-year-old Hebrew speakers and can therefore be attributed to theiryoung age. However, even these children’s performance on pronouns was stillworse than their performance on a control condition CN; thus, for both controlgroups, their only difficulty involved the experimental condition testing personalpronouns, NPr.

In contrast, the pattern demonstrated by the autism group revealed a persistentdifficulty with the experimental condition involving reflexives, NR. Comparingthe results of the three groups overall, the autism group performed significantlyworse on NR than either of the TD control groups: the estimated mean probabilitycorrect of children with autism on NR was 0.43, for the KBIT-TD it was 0.92, andTROG-TD it was 0.83. Crucially, on the NPr condition, their performance was nodifferent from either of the control groups’.

Like the KBIT-TD group, the autism group also showed the difference betweenthe NPr and NR, but crucially, this difference goes in the opposite direction:


children with autism had more difficulties with NR than with NPr. Recall, however,that there were two autistic children whose results followed the typical pattern ofa DPBE: good performance on reflexives, but poor on pronouns. Thus, althoughthe discussion here concerns the large majority of our sample, individual variationneeds to be kept in mind. Recall however, that there were no TD control childrenwho showed the atypical pattern, of a better performance on pronouns, and pooreron reflexives.

Children with autism did relatively well on the test of possessive structures, CP,although somewhat worse than the KBIT-TD controls, indicating that possessivesseem within reach for the majority of children with this disorder (a discussion onhow this performance can relate to the children’s performance on NR is providedbelow). Some individual variation also seems present here, as there were threeautistic children, along with four controls, who had difficulties interpreting thesesentences. Note that the poorer performance of these children did not affect theresults, because the same results were obtained even after these participants wereexcluded.

The performance of the autism group on the control CN condition was signifi-cantly worse than that of KBIT-TD group. Because these are simple subject–verb–object sentences, whose purpose was to ensure that autistic children are able tounderstand the task, one may wonder whether the extremely poor performance ofthe autism group on NR was due to these autistic children who showed difficultieswith this particular control condition. We do not believe this is the case: when thefive children with autism who do less than well on this condition are excludedfrom the analysis, the robust pattern remains: a significant difficulty with the inter-pretation of reflexives, not present in the matched controls, and an observable butless severe difficulty with pronouns, comparable to that seen in matched controls.Furthermore, because the autism group’s performance on CN was no different fromthat of TROG-TD, the youngest group matched on grammar comprehension, weattribute this result to general difficulties attending to the task in the autism group.

How do the observed patterns match our predictions outlined earlier? Recallthat Prediction 1 stated that if only pragmatic, but not syntactic knowledge wereaffected, children with autism should show difficulties interpreting personal butnot reflexive pronouns. Such a pattern would also be in line with the evidencedlanguage delay in this population: if language development follows the same pathas in TD, but develops much slower, a pattern resembling the DPBE, reportedwidely in the typical acquisition literature, was to be expected. Our data con-firm this prediction only with regard to pronouns: the observed difficulties withpersonal pronouns, comparable to matched TD controls, seem in line both with the“delayed but normal” characterization of language development in autism as wellas the reported pragmatic deficits (the nature of these deficits will be discussed inmore detail below). However, the extreme difficulty with the reflexive pronounsobserved in the data fits in better with Prediction 2, which stated that if syntaxwere also affected in autism, in addition to pragmatics, our participants should alsoshow difficulties interpreting reflexive pronouns. The pattern of extreme difficultywith reflexive pronouns cannot be explained by a mere delay in grammaticaldevelopment in autism: the disparity in the command of grammatical constraintsgoverning pronouns as opposed to reflexives, where Principle B is obeyed but


Principle A violated, is not evidenced at any stage of typical language develop-ment (for a review, see Perovic, 2004) and has been observed in other populationswith known grammatical deficits, such as Down syndrome (Perovic, 2004, 2006;Ring & Clahsen, 2005).

We argue that the difficulty in the interpretation of reflexives observed in thesample of children with autism in this study signals an impairment that is purelysyntactic in nature. Reflexive binding is governed by Principle A of binding theory;thus, we hypothesize that this principle is missing, or is incorrectly represented,in the grammar of children with autism. In particular, the c-command subpart ofPrinciple A is missing in the child with autism. If this is the case, how is theanaphor interpreted? Recall that the subject, the possessive NP, contained twopotential antecedents for the reflexive. In sentences such as “Bart’s dad is washinghimself,” participants with autism tended to incorrectly interpret “himself” asreferring to Bart, choosing the picture that shows Bart’s dad washing Bart. Onecould argue that children with autism rely on some linear rule to interpret thereflexive. For instance, assume that the child with autism interprets reflexives asrelying on a rule such as “the antecedent of a reflexive is a preceding noun phrasein the same clause.” Such a rule would in fact obtain the correct interpretationfor simple sentences involving the reflexive, that is, “Mary points to herself.”However, their poor performance on NR where the subject of the sentence isa possessive could be interpreted as signaling that children with autism do notknow the c-command part of Principle A: that the antecedent of a reflexive mustc-command the reflexive. Presumably a child with such a rule could choose eitherBart or Bart’s dad as the antecedent of the reflexive in Bart’s dad is pointing tohimself. After all, they are both in the same clause as the reflexive.

The suggestion that children use such a linear rule raises two important issues.First, should the existence of this linear rule be interpreted to mean that the childwith autism is completely missing the hierarchical rule of c-command? Second,why do our participants (with the exception of three children, as reported earlier)interpret CP sentences correctly?10

C-command is a structural notion, considered a primitive of grammar (Koster,1987; Neeleman & van de Koot, 2002; Williams, 1980; although see other accountswhich argue that the c-command relation is a consequence of general syntacticoperations, for example, Hornstein, 2001, 2009). Thus, not having c-command atall would severely impede most grammatical and interpretive understanding. Forexample, the subject–predicate relationship demands that the subject c-commandthe predicate. In Lisa is driving a car, Lisa c-commands driving a car. As we havepointed out, very little is known about the grammatical capacities of children withautism, so many possibilities are open. We simply point out here, that not havingc-command would be a fairly devastating deficiency.

Turning to the second issue, the aim of the CP condition was to test the c-command relation independently of binding: computing the subject–predicaterelationship in these sentences indicates that children with autism show sensitivityto c-command: “Lisa’s mom is driving the car” cannot be interpreted as “Lisa isdriving the car.” The semantic relationship (possession) between Lisa and momis usually interpreted as the c-commanding NP being the possessor. However,it could be argued that a linear strategy can also be used to interpret the CP


sentences. Assume that the child with autism interprets the second NP as thehead of possessive structure, “Bart’s dad”; this would always result in the correctinterpretation of possessive sentences. If the children also have the (wrong) linearrule for the interpretation of reflexives, where the antecedent of a reflexive is apreceding noun in the same clause, such a grammar would predict children’s goodperformance on CP, but poor or chance performance in NR.

Assuming that children with autism lack c-command altogether, yet can under-stand simple transitive sentences (as we see in our study) and can understand thepossessive relationship (as we see in our study) seems to implicate the existence ofseveral different kinds of linear rules. We have seen the need for a particular twoof these, one for the possessive, one for the reflexive. Although this is conceivable,we would have to explain how a child creates such a set of linear rules. It isnot entirely obvious how this could be done, but we will leave this matter oflearnability here for future study.

Thus, although we are hesitant to argue that c-command in general is missingin the grammar of autism, as this would imply a devastating deficit in this popu-lation, we settle for a more conservative hypothesis: we argue that children withautism do not show sensitivity to c-command in establishing the complex syntacticdependency of binding, where the antecedent of a reflexive must c-command thereflexive.

Support for the idea that the ability to establish complex syntactic dependenciesmay be compromised in autism comes from recent reports that complex syntacticoperations involved in the formation of passive and raising structures may also beaffected in children and teenagers with autism (Perovic et al., 2007). One theo-retical proposal suggests that binding should be reduced to a movement analysis(Hornstein, 2001). Because there are indications that children with autism havedifficulties with raising constructions (such as “John seems to Mary to be drivinga car,” which involve movement of the subject “John” from the subject positionin the embedded clause to the subject position in the main clause; Perovic etal., 2007), in addition to binding, it may seem as if the child with autism hasdifficulties with argument movement. This theory, however, would have to find away to account for why raising and binding are distinguished in other populations,for example, typical development (Hirsch & Wexler, 2007), Williams syndrome(Perovic & Wexler, 2007), where binding much precedes raising.11

To shed more light on the actual difficulties with reflexives in the grammarof autism, it would be relevant to investigate binding in those languages thatshow a contrast between “strong” and “weak” reflexive elements (zich vs. zichzelfin Dutch, sich vs. sich selbst in German, or the reflexive clitic se vs. the fullreflexive sebe in Serbo-Croatian). Perovic (2004, 2008) reports results of Serbianadolescents with Down syndrome who showed difficulties with the full reflexivesebe, but not with the reflexive clitic se, arguing that this is due to their inabilityto establish the syntactic relation of binding between the full reflexive and its an-tecedent. These participants, however, were able to understand inherently reflexivepredicates that can only appear with the clitic, and not with the full reflexive. It hasbeen argued that other theories of binding, such as Reinhart and Reuland (1993), orReuland (2001), may be better equipped to deal with the different types of reflexiveelements in these languages than the standard binding theory of Chomsky (1986;


for details, see Perovic, 2004, 2006, Ring & Clahsen, 2005). However, furtherresearch is needed, with a larger number of participants, to establish the exactnature of the violations of the syntactic principles guiding the interpretation ofreflexives in autism.

On the general level, our data have interesting implications for the linguistictheory of binding: they provide evidence that the constraints regulating reflexivesand pronouns are different in nature (i.e., there is a difference in how childrenwith autism treat reflexives as opposed to pronouns), or to put it differently, thatthe fractionation of binding into syntactic and nonsyntactic components is real(Reinhart, 1983). The well-established result of a difficulty with personal pronounsbut not reflexives in the typical acquisition literature, the DPBE phenomenon,proves this fractionation in one direction: it is the pragmatic/processing constraintthat is difficult to apply for the TD children who then cannot rule out illicitcoreference of pronouns. The pattern revealed here provides evidence for thisfractionation in the opposite direction: children with autism cannot apply theconstraint that falls within syntax proper. However, although our data demonstratea pattern reminiscent of the DPBE in our sample of children with autism, it is notimmediately obvious how and whether these results can help us decide whether theextra-syntactic constraint governing illicit coreference of pronouns is pragmaticor processing in nature, because opposing arguments have been provided in theliterature (cf. Chien & Wexler, 1990 vs. Grodzinsky & Reinhart, 1993). Furtherresearch is needed to establish whether autistic children’s performance woulddiffer on quantified as opposed to nonquantified antecedents, the issue crucialin these accounts. If TD children’s difficulties with personal pronouns are dueto their inability to block illicit coreference, which in turn is a result of theirimmature pragmatic abilities, one might expect children with autism, in view oftheir reported pragmatic deficits, to find the interpretation of personal pronounsextraordinarily difficult, even more so than the TD controls. One option wouldbe to consider the possibility that pragmatic abilities involved in ruling out illicitcoreference in TD populations are different in nature to those pragmatic abilitiesthat are affected in autism. Children with autism, for example, are known to havedifficulties assigning reference to speakers as opposed to addressees, for example,“I” versus “you,” or between the third person, for example, “Mary,” and the firstperson, “I.” However, when an action is directed toward only one third personreferent in the discourse, the difficulty in assigning reference is greatly reduced:the interpretative complexity of determining whether that object is reflexive ornonreflexive is greatly reduced. Further research is needed in this domain as well.

An important issue to consider is how general verbal and nonverbal abilities mayhave influenced the results of our group with autism. It is interesting to note thatthe autism group performed worse than either of the two control TD groups on re-flexives, revealing that neither of the two measures: nonverbal MA nor the generalcomprehension of grammar, were reliable predictors of our participants’ knowl-edge of this subtle aspect of grammar. Although nonverbal abilities, as measuredby KBIT Matrices, seemed stronger than their verbal abilities, our participantswith autism still performed worse than the much younger TD controls matchedon this measure, which suggests the observed deficit cannot be due to a generalcognitive deficit in the population with autism. Furthermore, they performed worse


than even the TD controls matched on TROG, indicating that the deficit in theinterpretation of reflexives is more severe than the general grammatical deficit inthis population would suggest. Clearer insights into the relation between generalcognitive abilities and the knowledge of this particular aspect of grammar canonly be obtained by comparisons of different populations with known intellectualimpairments. Although this study focussed on the population with autism only,results from studies on other developmental disorders reveal different patterns,suggesting that comprehension of reflexive and personal pronouns is independentfrom nonverbal as well as verbal MA. It has been shown that children and adultswith Down syndrome also have difficulties with the interpretation of reflexivepronouns (Perovic, 2004, 2006; Ring & Clahsen, 2005), in contrast to childrenand adolescents with Williams syndrome, who demonstrate a good comprehensionof both reflexives and pronouns (Clahsen & Almazan, 1998; Perovic & Wexler,2007; Ring & Clahsen, 2005; but, for indications of a “DPBE” in younger childrenwith Williams syndrome, see Perovic & Wexler, 2007). It is crucial that a recentstudy suggests that even when matched on chronological age and intellectual andverbal ability, children with autism perform worse than children with Williamssyndrome on reflexives, but not on pronouns (Perovic, Modyanova, & Wexler,2009). Why binding should be vulnerable in two disorders as different as Downsyndrome and autism remains to be answered.

CONCLUSIONS

The results from the first experimental investigation of binding in the populationwith autism reported here reveal two clear patterns. Children with autism showedsome difficulties interpreting personal pronouns (a “DPBE”), but these were nodifferent from the TD controls functioning at similar levels of verbal and nonverbalabilities, in line with the reported language delays and pragmatic deficits in thispopulation. Howver, they did show significant difficulties interpreting reflexives,significantly worse than either of the two groups of controls, matched on nonverbalMA or receptive grammar. Because for the interpretation of reflexives the syntacticrelation between the reflexive element and its antecedent is crucial, in contrastto pronouns, which are interpreted by invoking extrasyntactic mechanisms, thepattern suggests a deficit that is syntactic in nature. This pattern is not seen intypical development, but has been evidenced in other populations with syntacticimpairments, that is, Down syndrome (Perovic, 2004, 2006; Ring & Clahsen,2005). The observed pattern is in contrast to the traditional view that there isa pragmatic, but not a syntactic deficit in autism, because such a view predictsproblems with pronouns, but not with reflexives. Despite individual variability inour participants with autism, the observed deficiency of children with autism ona complex aspect of grammar such as binding and reports of other deficiencieson passives and raising, suggest that grammatical development in autism may bequalitatively different from that of typical development. Although further studieswith greater participant numbers are needed, these data contribute to a morecomprehensive picture of the knowledge of complex grammar in autism, an areaof research severely neglected in the literature.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis research was supported by the Anne and Paul Marcus Family Foundation; the BrainDevelopment and Disorders Project (BDDP) Postdoctoral Award (to A.P.); and the BrainInfrastructure Grant Program to the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology, from the Simons Initiative on Autism. We thank allof the participants and their families for taking part and the Autism Resource Center ofCentral Massachusetts and Children’s Hospital, Boston, for help with recruiting. We alsothank Lee Mavros-Rushton, the coordinator of BDDP, and all of the students in the WexlerLab for help with collecting data; Gordon Craig, Christopher Hirsch, Vikki Janke, and AdNeeleman for helpful discussions; and audiences at the 31st Boston University Conferenceon Language Development in November 2006; Autism Research UK, Open University,in May 2007; the Symposium on Research on Child Language Disorders, University ofWisconsin, Madison, in 2007; the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Con-ference, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, in September 2007; and the Symposia onInnovative Research in Autism, Tours, France, in April 2009, where some of the findingswere presented.

NOTES1. See Reuland and Everart (2001) for a critique of the standard framework and Hornstein

(2001), Reuland (2001) for alternative accounts of binding.2. Binding: X binds Y if X c-commands Y and is coreferential with Y (see the next Note for

more on coreference). C-command is a structural relationship between constituents: anoun phrase X c-commands a noun phrase Y if the first branching node that dominatesX also dominates Y (X dominates Y if it is “higher up” in a syntactic tree). C-commandis a core grammatical relationship pertinent to our understanding of how binding andreference work in natural language but also to other crucial syntactic phenomena, forexample, movement. For present purposes, local can mean “in the same clause as.”

3. There are two ways that a pronoun can have the same referent as a noun phrase. Avery pervasive way is for a pronoun to “pick up” its referent from an antecedent,typically uttered in the discourse (although sometimes the discourse is wider thanthe current situation). This is, perhaps, most obvious when the pronoun is clearly a“variable.” In the sentence “Every woman in the class thought she would do well,”the pronoun she picks up its referent from every woman, varying in reference witheach woman in the set denoted by every woman in the class: for example, “Susanthought she (Susan) would do well,” “Mary thought she (Mary) would do well,” andso forth. However, even in a sentence like “Mary thought that she would do well,” thepronoun she picks up its referent from an antecedent (Mary). We think of the pronounin all these cases as being “bound” to its antecedent; it picks up its referent from theantecedent. Principle B applies to this type of relationship. In contrast, a pronounmay corefer with another noun phrase “accidentally.” The pronoun does not “pickup” its referent from the other noun phrase; rather, the pronoun and the noun phrasejust happen to refer to the same person or thing. Consider a discourse like, “That guymust be John. At least he looks like him.” Here the pronoun him picks up its referencefrom the noun phrase John, so it corefers with John. However, him also is coreferentialwith the noun phrase that guy. The speaker is asserting that that guy is John, andhim, which is coreferential with John also must be coreferential with that guy. This


relationship is not one of “picking up reference,” rather it is what is called “accidentalcoreference.” Him corefers with that guy, but does not pick up its referent from it.This is a relationship of coreference, but not a bound variable relationship. Similarlyhe and him in the second sentence of the discourse are coreferential, but neither picksup its referent from the other; they are coreferential, but there is no bound variablerelationship between them. Principle B does not apply to this relationship, so he andhim in the second sentence corefer, he locally c-commands him, yet Principle B doesnot apply to make this sentence ungrammatical, because there is no bound variablerelationship between he and him.

4. Although this is the prevalent view in the literature (i.e., for a review, see Guasti, 2002),other accounts have also been proposed; for example, see Hendriks and Spenader(2005/2006) for an account couched in the optimality theory framework.

5. See Grodzinsky and Reinhart (1993) for an argument that the observed pattern is dueto an error in syntactic processing: the failure of Rule I (preserving the Chien andWexler proposal about the distinction in children’s behavior between bound variableand coreferential pronouns). See Thornton and Wexler (1999) for a response to thatsuggestion, defending Wexler and Chien’s (1985) original “pragmatic” hypothesis.

6. The pattern of children’s worse performance on pronouns when referential as opposedto when bound by a quantificational antecedent has been disputed at both ends of thespectrum. On the one hand, Elbourne (2005) argues that quantificational asymmetryis not real: children have difficulties interpreting pronouns both with referential andquantified antecedents, that is, they lack the knowledge of Principle B altogether,until at least about 6 years of age. Conroy, Takashi, Lidz, and Philips (2010), on theother hand, argue that DPBE is an experimental artifact: in their study, children areable to interpret pronouns both bound and referential. Both studies question the truthvalue judgment method used in the original experiments displaying the DPBE withreferential pronouns and the lack of it with bound pronouns. Further research is neededto help us decide between conflicting data and arguments; however, this issue is notof immediate concern to us: we aim to replicate studies that use a picture selectionmethod, and not truth value judgment, and focus on children’s comprehension ofreferential pronouns, not those bound by quantified antecedents.

7. Matching did not create a dependency between the scores across the groups, andhence, the groups can be treated as independent. Consequently, match is not includedas a random effect.

8. It is possible that the four verbs used here could have elicited different responses in ourparticipants. It has been argued (Everaert, 1986) that wash and dry belong to the groupof verbs that are ambiguous between inherently reflexive and regular transitive verbs:when inherently reflexive, these verbs can be used without the reflexive pronoun: “Iwash every day,” and when regular transitive verbs, they are “reflexivized” by thepresence of the reflexive “I wash myself everyday” (Reuland & Reinhart, 1993). Theother two verbs, touch and point to are regular transitive verbs and cannot be usedwithout the reflexive in reflexive contexts. Note, however, that different uses of washand dry are rarely observed in everyday American English. Crucially, Wexler andChien (1985) found little variability between children’s performance on these samefour verbs. Although it seems unlikely that the children here treated wash and drydifferently from touch and point to in reflexive contexts, this issue should still beconsidered in future studies and verb included as a random effect in the model.


9. We assume a cutoff point of 6/8 (75%) correct as indicating that the structure has beenmastered, in line with Hirsch and Wexler (2007), who used a similar experimentalmethodology to test raising structures in TD children aged 3–9 years. This, of course,may not be conservative enough, but notice that raising the cutoff point to 7/8 or 8/8correct would result in eliminating a greater number of autistic children. Using a largernumber of items per condition in this type of experimental design may be a solutionin future studies; however, other requirements have to be taken into consideration,such as the generally shorter attention span of the child with autism, the number ofexperimental tasks researchers can carry out in a single experimental session, and soforth.

10. Note that the error in CP was that the child chooses the wrong syntactic subject (Bartinstead of Bart’s dad), whereas the error in NR is that the child chooses the wrongreferent of the syntactic object, namely, “himself” to refer to Bart instead of Bart’sdad. The relations of subject and object (agent, patient) are depicted in the picture. Ifthe child chose the wrong subject (Bart instead of Bart’s dad) in the NR case, it justmakes neither of the two pictures fit the sentence, because both of them have Bart’sdad doing the action. This might lead to chance performance (guessing behavior) butit would also predict chance performance on NPr, and we have seen that children withautism perform significantly better on NPr than NR. Thus, there are two reasons whywe do not think that performance on possessives predicts the poor performance onreflexives: the good performance on CP and the significantly better performance onNPr compared to NR.

11. For discussion on how other components of Hornstein’s analysis, the movementanalysis of the construction of “control structures” fare in typical language acquisition,see Hirsch and Wexler (2007).

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