The present paper reports the results of an experimental study1 on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora in child Romanian. In a picture-selection task, 3-, 5- and 8-year old monolingual Romanian children had to identify the matrix antecedent of 3rd person overt pronouns, null pronouns and demonstratives which were used as the subject in a temporal adjunct. The results showed that only 8-year-olds had adult-like antecedent preferences. At age 3 and at age 5, Romanian-speaking monolingual children do not distinguish between the discourse-pragmatics properties of overt and null 3rd person pronouns. With demonstratives, they have adult-like biases as early as age 3. This developmental asymmetry is accounted for in terms of the properties of the Romanian pronominal system, where overt pronominal subjects can occur in topic continuity contexts, on a par with null pronominal subjects. This overlap between the two types of pronominal subject can delay the identification of their discourse-pragmatics properties.1The results reported in this paper are part of Teodorescu, O. (2017) The Acquisition of the Subject in Child Romanian at the Syntax-Discourse Interface, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Bucharest. They were partly presented at the 3rd Bucharest University Colloquium of Language Acquisition and at The Romance Turn 8, Bellaterra. I thank the audiences at these conferences for their comments and suggestions. The remaining errors are, of course, mine.
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