CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVE-TAKING AND CHILDRENS INTERPRETATION OF PRONOUNS IN REPORTED SPEECH

This study examines the role of cognitive development in children's us e 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 shif ts, 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 sen tences. In the Verbal task, they gave antecedent choices in response t o a question (e.g. ... that WHO Knew Superman?). In the Puppet task, w hich prompts the perspective shift, they made a puppet say the reporte d speech portion (e.g. I/you know Superman). Violations of the pragmat ic constraint decreased with age and task, consistent with the perspec tive-shift model. Parallel function effects in neutral sentences were weaker than in previous research on conjoined sentences, but similar t o recent results for adults with these materials.