Abstract
The paper reports on a study that examined the knowledge of Principles A and B of the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981) in 30 Qatari-Arabic-speaking children aged between 3,3 and 5,11(1) using a truth-value judgment task. The results showed that these children obeyed Principle A as early as 3,3, with no difference between constructions with morphologically reflexive verbs and ones with proforms. As for Principle B, their performance lagged behind that of Principle A. Thus the proposal that clitic pronouns are faster to acquire (McKee, 1992) cannot be supported in Arabic. The results also showed that children's performance on both principles in the mismatch condition improved with age. We suggest that the delay in the development of Principle B and the asymmetry between the results in the match and mismatch conditions could be partly explained in extra-linguistic terms, namely pragmatic and cognitive.