The role of cognitive and linguistic abilities on subject personal pronoun expression in Spanish-speaking children

This study analyses subject personal pronoun (SPP) use in Spanish among 82 typically developing children, assessing how executive functions (EFs) and linguistic abilities interact with third-person singular pronoun expression. Researchers manually coded 9750 SPP instances from sociolinguistic interviews and administered standardized tests of morphosyntax, lexicon, inhibition, working memory (WM), and attention. The investigation had two aims: (1) to replicate prior findings on SPP constraints and (2) to evaluate the contributions of linguistic and EF abilities to third-person pronoun expression. Mixed-effects binary logistic regressions confirmed three common constraints on SPP use: the first-person singular, the imperfect tense, and switch-reference contexts, replicating previous studies' results. Although initial correlations linked EF measures to SPP expression, multiple regression analyses revealed that morphosyntactic abilities accounted for the unique variance in pronoun expression. Thus, in this sample, children's language-internal morphosyntactic abilities are better related to third-person singular pronoun expression than our tests of inhibition, attention, and WM.