The bear wants a small green apple and a big one: Insights into anaphoric reconstruction in child Romanian

Abstract

We investigate how 4-year-old children reconstruct the anaphoric pronoun unul ‘one’ when modified by Color or Size adjectives in Romanian, an understudied Noun-Adjective language. In a Truth Value Judgment Task, both adults and children accept unul ‘one’ to refer to apple or small apple in Ursuleţul vrea un măr verde mic şi unul galben ‘The bear wants a small green apple and a yellow one’. In Ursuleţul vrea un măr verde mic şi unul mare ‘The bear wants a small green apple and a big one’, children take unul ‘one’ to refer to apple or green apple, while adults only accept green apple. Based on these findings, we argue that while adults seem to be sensitive to hierarchical nesting in anaphoric reconstruction, children seem to operate on the basis of other reconstruction preferences at this developmental stage.