Semantic components in children's errors with pronouns

In the presence of the experimenter and two dolls, children were asked to respond to sentences containing pronous which required distinctions to be made on the basis of person, number, and gender, such as “Point tomy (your, his, her, our, their) feet.” Errors tended to maintain distinctions; for example,we was treated as if it meantI (maintaining first person) orthey (maintaining plural) more often than could be accounted for by a response-bias model. Furthermore, there were consistent individual differences in the kinds of distinctions that were difficult; some subjects has more trouble with number, others with person. These findings support the notion that errors made during acquisition result from dropping only part of the correct meaning, and they suggest that individuals may differ in the relative strengths of different components.