The Psychology of Reading: Theory and Applications by Paula J. Schwanenflugel & Nancy Flanagan Knapp

Author:Paula J. Schwanenflugel & Nancy Flanagan Knapp [Schwanenflugel, Paula J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781462523542
Publisher: Guilford Publications
Published: 2015-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

Peter Rabbit lost his appetite. Now when Peter Rabbit loses his appetite, something is very wrong indeed with him. Peter has boasted that he can eat any time and all the time. In fact, two things that Peter thinks most about are his stomach and satisfying his curiosity, and nearly all the scrapes that Peter has gotten into have been because of these two things. (Burgess, 1920, pp. 1–2)

Note that Peter is repeated over and over when simply he or him might do. For adults, this kind of repetition feels confusing because it violates our sense, mentioned earlier, that we do not rename entities that are focal in our discourse representation. (This confusion has been demonstrated and is called the repeated-name penalty; Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993.) However, renaming the subject in children’s texts over and over again is very common (Arnold, 1998).

Is there any justification for avoiding pronouns with young children? Maybe. Most 5-year-olds are able to use gender and number to identify pronoun antecedents (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2007). However, children this age still have difficulty in determining antecedents for ambiguous pronouns and are unable to use some of the cues that adults normally use to infer the correct antecedent (Arnold et al., 2007). This finding suggests that teachers should be attentive to the fact that young readers may have difficulty identifying the antecedents of pronouns in texts that they are reading.

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