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Conceptual perspective-taking and children's interpretation of pronouns in reported speech*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Ron Smyth
Ron Smyth*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Scarborough College
*
Division of Humanities, Scarborough College, University of Toronto, 1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, Ontario, M1C 1A4, Canada.
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Abstract

This study examines the role of cognitive development in children's use of pragmatic cues for anaphora resolution. Reported speech sentences like Minnie told Dorothy that she knew Superman are biased toward the matrix subject. This bias is claimed to depend on two conceptual shifts, first to the speaker's and then to the listener's perspective. 141 children aged 5;0–8;0 performed two tasks with biased and neutral sentences. In the Verbal task, they gave antecedent choices in response to a question (e.g.… that WHO knew Superman?). In the Puppet task, which prompts the perspective shift, they made a puppet say the reported speech portion (e.g. I/you know Superman). Violations of the pragmatic constraint decreased with age and task, consistent with the perspective-shift model. Parallel function effects in neutral sentences were weaker than in previous research on conjoined sentences, but similar to recent results for adults with these materials.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 171 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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Footnotes

[*]

This study was funded by research grant 410-89-0395 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank Carol Baxter for collecting the data and Irek Celejewski for his assistance with the data analyses. Tracey Derwing, David Olson and Elizabeth Ritter made valuable comments on earlier drafts.

References

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