ABSTRACT

The nonego-anchored children included Eric (28 months), Keith (31 months), and Thomas (32 months). At the onset of the study all three had a mean MLU over 3.0. Several other factors led to the conclusion in Chapter 4 that this group of children was linguistically more advanced than the ego-anchored children. The nonego-anchored children could be distinguished from the three ego-anchored children in that: (a) in their utterances they referred almost as often to others as to themselves (see Fig. 4.1), (b) they relied primarily on a single self reference form I, and (c) their use of self reference forms did not deviate from the target language in the ways noted for the ego-anchored children. Because the findings for the nonego-anchored children were so similar, I consider the children jointly, noting along the way any major individual differences. I begin this discussion with a reconsideration of the general distribution of self reference forms for the three children at the onset of the study.