Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:18:59.612Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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

REFERENCES

Borke, H. (1975). Piaget's mountains revisited: changes in the egocentric landscape. Developmental Psychology 11, 240–3.Google Scholar
Brener, R. (1983). Learning the deictic meaning of third person pronouns. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 12, 235–62.Google Scholar
Calam, R. M. (1983). Children's photograph selections and verbal reports in a spatial task. Perception 12, 599–606.Google Scholar
Caramazza, A. & Gupta, S. (1979). The roles of topicalization, parallel function and verb semantics in the interpretation of pronouns. Linguistics 17, 497–518.Google Scholar
Caramazza, A., Grober, E., Garvey, C. & Yates, J. (1977). Comprehension of anaphoric pronouns. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16, 601–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charney, R. (1980). The development of personal pronouns. Journal of Child Language 7, 509–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chomsky, C. (1969). The acquisition of syntax in children from 5 to 10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
de Villiers, P. A. & de Villiers, J. G. (1974). On this, that, and the other: non-egocentrism in very young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 18, 438–47.Google Scholar
Denham, A. (1986). Social cognition, prosocial behavior and emotion in preschoolers: contextual validation. Child Development 57, 194–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, K. (1983). Comprehension of pronouns. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 3, 247–55Google Scholar
Fehr, L. A., Lapsley, D. K., Enright, R. D., McMahon, P. M. & Ackerman, A. M. (1983). Co-ordination of perspectives: the importance of stimulus dimensionality. Journal of General Psychology 108, 73–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeman, N. H. (1980). Strategies of representation in young children. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
French, L. & Brown, A. (1977). Comprehension of before and after in logical and arbitrary sequences. Journal of Child Language 4, 247–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garvey, C. & Caramazza, A. (1974). Implicit causality in verbs. Linguistic Inquiry 5, 459–64.Google Scholar
Garvey, C., Caramazza, A. & Yates, J. (1976). Factors influencing assignment of pronoun antecedents. Cognition 3, 227–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gnepp, J., McKee, E. & Domanic, J. (1987). Children's use of situational information to infer emotion: understanding emotionally equivocal situations. Developmental Psychology 23, 114–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gollin, E. S. & Sharps, M. J. (1987). Visual perspective-taking in young children: reduction of egocentric errors by induction of strategy. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 25, 435–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodluck, H. (1987). Children's interpretations of pronouns and null NP's: an alternate view. In Lust, B. (ed.), Studies in the acquisition of anaphora. Vol. II. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (eds), Syntax and semantics. Vol. 3: Speech acts. New York: Seminar.Google Scholar
Grober, E. H., Beardsley, W. & Caramazza, A. (1978). Parallel function strategy in pronoun assignment. Cognition 6, 117–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hobson, R. P. (1980). The question of egocentrism: the young child's competence in the coordination of perspectives. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 21, 325–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Liben, L. S. (1978). Perspective-taking skills in young children: seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Developmental Psychology 14, 87–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loveland, K. A. (1984). Learning about points of view: spatial perspective and the acquisition of ‘I/you’. Journal of Child Language 11, 535–56.Google Scholar
Lust, B. (ed.) (1986). Studies in the acquisition of anaphora. Vol. I: Defining the constraints. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lust, B. (ed.) (1987). Studies in the acquisition of anaphora. Vol. II: Applying the constraints. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. (1973). The effects of stress on the understanding of pronominal co-reference in children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2, 1–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maratsos, M. P. (1976). The use of definite and indefinite reference in young children. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Piaget, J. & Inhelder, B. (1956). The child's conception of space. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Smyth, R. H. (1991). Grammatical determinants of ‘ambiguous’ pronoun resolution. Unpublished MS.Google Scholar
Smyth, R. H. (1992). Multiple feature matching in pronoun resolution: a new look at parallel function. In Ohala, J. J., Nearey, T. M., Derwing, B. L., Hodge, M. M. & Wiebe, G. E. (eds), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. Edmonton: University of Alberta.Google Scholar
Solan, L. (1983). Pronominal reference: child language and the theory of grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Springston, J. (1975). Some cognitive aspects of presupposed coreferential anaphora. Unpublished dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Urberg, K. A. & Docherty, E. M. (1976). Development of role-taking skills in young children. Developmental Psychology 12, 198–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, L. D. & Gollin, E. S. (1977). Perspective role-taking in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 24, 343–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar