{"pk":50206,"title":"Cross-Linguistic Influence and Developmental Patterns in Reflexive Pronoun Use Among Monolingual, Bilingual, and Trilingual Children","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Chinese employs compound reflexives (e.g., ta-ziji) adhering to local binding principles, and bare reflexives (ziji) exhibiting syntactic and semantic flexibility (e.g., logophoric, intensifier, generic pronoun, (Wang & Pan, 2021), whereas English reflexives primarily function as locally bound anaphors but permit extended logophoric/intensifier uses in long-distance contexts (Charnavel, 2019). Previous studies show that monolingual Mandarin children achieve adult-like local and long-distance interpretations by age four (Li, 2024), while English monolinguals master reflexives by five (Chien & Wexler, 1990). This study examines 5,299 reflexive utterances from 476 monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual children (1;0–6;9) and caregivers across 19 CHILDES corpora. Results show Chinese bare reflexives emerge earliest (1;7), followed by Chinese compound reflexives (1;11) and English reflexives (2;4). Chinese reflexives are used as local anaphoric quite late (2;6), possibly attributed to low frequency in input (< .005%). Multilingual children acquiring English alongside Chinese exhibit English-like local-binding preferences in their Chinese bare reflexives.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Development; Language acquisition; Language Production; Statistical learning; Syntax; Corpus studies; Cross-cultural analysis; Cross-linguistic analysis"}],"section":"Member Abstracts with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7xs6k5h2","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yue","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chen","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Mengyao","middle_name":"","last_name":"Shang","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Chinese University of Hong Kong","department":""},{"first_name":"Ziyin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Mai","name_suffix":"","institution":"Chinese University of Hong Kong","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50206/galley/38168/download/"}]}