Different rates of pronoun case error: comments on Rispoli (1998)
Rispoli (1998) presents data to motivate a model of pronoun case errors in child English. His data consist of relative rates of occurrence of errors involving particular forms in the study of twenty-seven English children between the ages of 2.6 and 4.0. I show that his claim that overextensions of he and him are antagonistic cannot be maintained. I argue that his explanation for why her subjects are more frequent than other errors is insufficient, and suggest an account in terms of relative input frequencies. Finally, I demonstrate that the fundamental assumption underlying Rispoli's model is untenable, and that his findings are not counterevidence for developmental syntax models such as that of Schütze (1997).
Schütze
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Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles 90095-1543, USA. cschutze@ucla.edu
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D014705:Verbal Behavior