Elephants and Optimality Again: SA-OT accounts for pronoun resolution in child language

Abstract

Children display a surprising delay in correctly resolving pronouns, while they employ Chomsky’s binding principles correctly in production and in resolving reflexives. We account for the mistakes as performance errors that are predicted by an Optimality Theoretical model implemented using simulated annealing. Our experiments suggest three novel explanations of the facts. Additionally, the Optimality Theory-Harmony Grammar connection is also explored: the behaviour of the HG-based performance model converges to the OTmodel if the base of the exponential weights grow large.