Noun Phrase Anaphora and Referential Behaviour in Child-Directed Speech During the Child’s First Year

Sammanfattning: “Anaphora” is a label used for a referential expression that connects one entity (e.g. a pronoun) to another previously established entity (e.g. a proper name). The previously established entity is called an antecedent. The use of anaphora will, in this study, be referred to as referential behaviour. The study was based around audio and video recordings of free play between a Swedish parent and his/her child. 10 parents and their children were recorded. The referential behaviour of the parents was analysed. The sessions took place when the children were 3, 6, 9 and 12 months old. Recent studies indicate that speech directed at children during a child's first six months contains a larger amount of pronouns than the speech directed at children between 6 and 12 months of age. The purpose of the study was to examine if the decline of pronouns was visible in Swedish child- directed speech, and to see how different types of anaphora appeared in the same speech. Correlations between the visible changes of different types of referential expressions were also examined. A drop in the use of anaphoric pronoun with an explicit antecedent was found for the last two ages, which confirmed the study’s hypothesis. The results were also compared to each child’s vocabulary development.