When you isn't <i>you</i>:The attraction of self­-ascription in children’s interpretation of pronouns in reported speech

In language comprehension, 'you 'is a 'de se 'pronoun, which means that its interpretation is guided by a simple 'de se 'rule ('you '= self-ascription by addressee), while the interpretation of other pronouns requires more complicated reasoning. This predicts that 'you 'should be easier to process than 'I 'or 'he', especially for children. But not all occurrences of 'you 'can be correctly interpreted via self-ascription. We consider two cases where 'you 'does not indicate self-ascription: interpretation as an eavesdropper and direct speech. In our experiment, we compare children’s interpretation of the pronouns 'I', 'you 'and 'he', in both direct and indirect reported speech, and in both addressee and eavesdropping situations. We tested 71 five-year-olds, 63 nine-year-olds, and 52 adults in a referent-selection task and found a clear 'de se 'effect for children when directly addressed: they performed better with 'you 'than with 'I'/'he 'in indirect speech, but worse with 'you 'than with 'I'/'he 'in direct speech. We explain the latter finding in terms of the attraction of the 'de se 'interpretation strategy, which leads addressees to automatically self-ascribe 'you 'even in a direct speech report

The interpretation of Dutch direct speech reports by Frisian-Dutch bilinguals

Frisian and Dutch both have a direct speech reporting construction and an indirect speech reporting construction with verb final word order. Frisian also has an additional indirect speech reporting construction, the embedded verb-second construction which resembles direct speech in many respects. We investigated whether Frisian-Dutch bilinguals show negative transfer in their interpretation of direct speech in Dutch. We hypothesized that Frisian-Dutch bilinguals would rate an infelicitous embedded V2 construction in Dutch as higher than Dutch monolinguals. Further we hypothesized that when tested on their interpretation of direct speech reports in Dutch, Frisian-Dutch bilinguals would make more errors than their monolingual Dutch counterparts. Our results support both hypotheses

Children mix direct and indirect speech:evidence from pronoun comprehension

This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, “I get the football”) and indirect speech (Elephant said that he gets the football), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we hypothesize that the direct–indirect distinction is acquired relatively late. We also predict more mistakes for third person pronouns compared to first and second person pronouns. We tested 136 Dutch-speaking children between four and twelve in a referent selection task and found that children interpret pronouns in direct speech predominantly as in indirect speech, supporting our hypothesis about a late acquisition of the direct–indirect distinction. In addition, we found differences between I, you, and he that deviate from a simple first and second vs. third person split. We discuss our results in the light of cross-linguistic findings of direct–indirect mixing

Between direct and indirect speech: The acquisition of pronouns in reported speech

Een fundamentele eigenschap van het menselijk taalvermogen is het kunnen weergeven van wat iemand anders gezegd heeft. De meeste talen, inclusief het Nederlands, maken een onderscheid tussen twee soorten redeweergave: directe rede (Anna zei: "Ik ben blij") en indirecte rede (Anna zei dat ze blij was). In mijn proefschrift onderzoek ik hoe en wanneer kinderen in staat zijn om directe en indirecte rede uit elkaar te houden. Ik heb hiervoor een tablet app ontworpen, waarin kinderen op grond van gesproken zinnetjes als “Olifant zei dat ik de voetbal krijg” moeten bepalen welk dier de voetbal krijgt. De resultaten laten zien dat Nederlandse kinderen vanaf vier jaar de indirecte rede al onder de knie hebben, maar dat zelfs elfjarigen nog worstelen met de directe rede. Dit is verrassend omdat kinderboeken juist relatief veel directe rede bevatten. Om deze paradox op te lossen, hebben we het tablet spel omgebouwd tot een soort interactief plaatjesboek. Het blijkt dat kinderen vanaf zes jaar geen moeite hebben met de directe rede als die gepresenteerd wordt in de context van een verhaal. We concluderen dat kinderen een minder strict onderscheid maken tussen directe en indirete rede dan volwassenen, en hiervoor meer afhankelijk zijn van de context

The advantage of story-Telling: Children's interpretation of reported speech in narratives

Children struggle with the interpretation of pronouns in direct speech (Ann said, “I get a cookie”), but not in indirect speech (Ann said that she gets a cookie) (Köder & Maier, 2016). Yet children's books consistently favor direct over indirect speech (Baker & Freebody, 1989). To reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings, we hypothesize that the poor performance found by Köder and Maier (2016) is due to the information-transmission setting of that experiment, and that a narrative setting facilitates children's processing of direct speech. We tested 42 Dutch children (4;1–7;2) and 20 adults with a modified version of Köder and Maier's referent selection task, where participants interpret speech reports in an interactive story book. Results confirm our hypothesis: children are much better at interpreting pronouns in direct speech in such a narrative setting than they were in an information-transmission setting. This indicates that the pragmatic context of reports affects their processing effort

Children's metonymy comprehension: Evidence from eye-tracking and picture selection

In this paper we investigate children's processing and comprehension of metonymy, a type of figurative use of language where an object or individual is referred to via a salient property (e.g., The beard used to refer to a man with a big beard). We tested 126 children aged 3 to 8 years and an adult control group, using a novel methodology which combines an online (eye-tracking) and an offline (picture selection) measure. The results from the picture selection task replicate the findings of a U-shape reported in Falkum et al. (2017), with a better performance of 3-year-olds compared to 4- to-5-year-olds, who tend to prefer literal interpretations of target metonymic utterances. The gaze data, however, while also suggesting an early sensitivity to metonymy from the age of 3, show a continuous improvement of understanding with age. We discuss the results in the light of theoretical accounts of children's pragmatic development. We argue that eye-tracking is a ‘purer’ and cognitively less demanding measure of figurative language comprehension, which sheds new light on children's developing pragmatic competence