In this paper we investigated the real-time processing of epistemic modals in five-year-olds. In a simple reasoning scenario, we monitored children's eye-movements while processing a sentence with modal expressions of different force ("might/must"). Children were also asked to judge the truth-value of the target sentences at the end of…

Pronouns seem to be acquired in an asymmetrical way, where children confuse the meaning of pronouns with reflexives up to the age of six, but not vice versa. Children's production of the same referential expressions is appropriate at the age of four. However, response-based tasks, the usual means to investigate child language comprehension, are…

Investigates the claim that very young children avoid backwards coreference in their interpretation of sentences containing pronouns. It is argued that children initially prefer internal coreference even when such a response is disallowed for structural reasons and that avoidance appears to be a late developing phenomenon characteristic of…