UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (2001)
Binding
Principles in Down syndrome
ALEXANDRA PEROVIC
In an experiment designed to tap into knowledge of Binding
in individuals with Down syndrome (DS), it was found that subjects had specific
difficulties assigning appropriate interpretation to reflexives, traditionally
claimed to be governed by Principle A of standard Binding Theory, as opposed to
pronouns, constrained by Principle B in the same framework. This pattern, not
previously evidenced in the literature, is the reverse of the well known
‘Delay of Principle B’ effect confirmed in typical acquisition. The
findings suggest that the process of acquisition of Binding in DS may be
qualitatively different compared to typical linguistic development, rendering
the traditional 'slow-but-normal' characterisation of language development in
DS no longer tenable. Embracing the Reflexivity framework of Reinhart &
Reuland (1993), I also argue that these findings reveal a specific syntactic
deficit in the language of DS, related to the inability to establish a certain
syntactic dependency, namely the binding relation between an anaphor and its
antecedent.
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