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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2009
Over the past 15 years, a number of acquisition studies have found that young children allow pronouns to take an antecedent within their clause, in violation of Principle B of the binding theory. Thus, unlike adults, they allow him to refer to Nathan in the sentence Nathan praised him. Thornton and Wexler present results of a new experiment testing knowledge of binding within VP ellipsis structures of the form Nathan praised him, and Albert did too. Whereas adults do not allow the pronouns in each conjunct to have different antecedents, some children do. Based on their findings, Thornton and Wexler propose that children's syntactic knowledge is intact (and hence Principle B is being observed) but their pragmatic knowledge is incomplete.