The Occurrence of Pronouns

They are here.
All in one day.
All mixed up.
Totally not what I was expecting and...
definitely not like what I learned in textbooks.

It ain't easy learning the English pronominal system for English-as-a-second-language learners or native English-speaking toddlers. The acquisition and later mastery of these seemingly simple words require a massive amount of understanding of relations. Learners also need to understand basic semantic properties that a sentence is consisted of and their appropriate locations. They need to know what type of pronouns replaces and/or reflects what type of nouns. It is such a complex process, in fact, it takes an average child 5 years to learn and use them all consistently correctly.

As a typical textbook case of pronoun development in child language acquisition, subjective pronouns, such as I and You, are the first to appear, followed closely by objective pronouns (me and you). The third to appear are the possessive pronouns (your, his,mine), and last but not least, the reflective ones (myself, himself). In addition to the different types of pronouns, what adds to the complexity of pronoun acquisition is the fact that the English language is gender-specific and quantity-specific. What that means in child language development is that, at the same time all these four types of pronouns emerge very often in the order mentioned above, other patterns can also be observed. For instance, 1st- and 2nd- person pronouns are acquired earlier than 3rd- person ones, and singulars occur before plurals.

The occurrence of pronouns and the order in which they appear obviously vary from child to child. In Kai's case, he didn't start using subjective pronouns until yesterday, which is right at the later part of the expected age range according to the textbooks (subjective pronouns usually occur in toddlers between 12-26 months of age). Granted, we've taught him to make polite requests (questions beginning with May I and Can I), but in my mind those were repetitions of set phrases, which did not signify spontaneous acquisition. However, once Kai deliberately used the first "I" in a sentence at my friend's house in Seattle, all these other ones started popping up all over the place in numerous occasions (in other words, they were not isolated single occurrence).

In the last 48 hours, Kai has used all four types of pronouns in random order. He'd say, "Kaikai put on shoes all by himself" (while still referring to himself as third person). He'd give me a toy and say, "This is for you, Mommy" (note the use of two pronouns in the sentence). He'd point at a character in the book and ask, "What his name?" And he'd argue with me as for who should cut his food into small pieces, "No Mommy do it. I do it."

The only pronouns that are still absent in Kai's speech are the plurals in all four categories. However, according to the textbooks, they are expected in speeches between 34 to 47 months of age.