While normative Hebrew distinguishes between atem/hem ‘you/they-msc-plural’ and aten/hen ‘you/they-fem-plural’, many current speakers use the masculine forms for both feminine and masculine plural referents, and it has been claimed that the masculine/feminine distinction has disappeared from the spoken language (Borochovsky Bar-Aba 2002). However, corpus examination shows many cases where the s...

This paper looks at mismatching phenomena in Romance languages that appear between verbs and pronouns (or similarly used nouns) when expressing the first person (plural and singular). It is well known that, relative to other pronouns, first person pronouns are more easily subject to meaning shift as well as to replacement by other expressions. This can be attributed to the pivotal function of f...

Impersonal pronouns are prototypically used in generic sentences to make generalizations about people. Yet they unlike bare plural people or indefinite singular a person that exhibit sensitivity first-person perspective. This relationship can be seen ( a) inferences of experience associated with use these pronouns, b) additional meaning components carried by impersonally personal involving pres...

BACKGROUND A number of studies have suggested that language in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may not be simply delayed compared with language in typically developing (TD) children, but deviant. The deviance has been detected in the comprehension of pronouns, and it has triggered proposals for the existence of a specific syntactic deficit in individuals with DS. However, the developmental ...

In this paper we present a cognitive model of the acquisition and use of referring expressions in discourse. In certain discourse contexts, children produce unrecoverable pronouns where a full NP would have been the adult choice. Based on computational simulations of our model, we argue that adult-like use of referring subjects requires (a) sufficient working memory capacity to identify the dis...

This paper presents a study of the effect of working memory load on the interpretation of pronouns in different discourse contexts: stories with and without a topic shift. We discuss a computational model (in ACT-R, Anderson, 2007) to explain how referring expressions are acquired and used. On the basis of simulations of this model, it is predicted that WM constraints only affect adults' pronou...

Participants in this study were 66 British toddlers who were observed at home with familiar peers on two occasions, six months apart. The majority of toddlers spoke to their peers, with short sequences of conversation emerging after the age of 24 months. The use of possessive pronouns emerged between 18 and 24 months of age and consolidated over the next year. Toddlers who said ‘mine’ were also...