Children’s pronoun errors: exploring contrasting accounts of why children produce nonnominative subjects

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate different explanations of a particular pronoun error which children sometimes produce during language acquisition. This error involves children producing nonnominative pronouns in the subject position of some sentences (e.g. Her is kicking the ball). There has been an explanation of this phenomenon (known as the Agreement/Tense Omission Model, or ATOM) put forward by Schütze & Wexler (1996), based on the Universal Grammar theory. This account has been challenged in a number of papers (Pine, Rowland, Lieven, & Theakston, 2005; Ambridge & Pine, 2006), which found data that was not consistent with the predictions of the ATOM. Pine et al. (2005) went on to suggest that this pronoun error phenomenon could be better explained through a Constructivist or input-based theory. This paper endeavours to evaluate this claim, by investigating whether the language input provided to the children in Pine et al.’s (2005) study is consistent with a number of input-based explanations of these child pronoun errors. The findings of this investigation do not appear to be supportive of the Constructivist-based explanations which are investigated. Therefore, it would appear that this area would benefit from further research and theory development.