The advantage of story-telling: children's interpretation of reported speech in narratives.

Franziska Köder,Emar Maier

doi:10.1017/s0305000917000344

Abstract

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.

Highlights

The paradox of direct speech Consider the following passage from Arnold Lobel’s classic Frog and Toad are Friends (Lobel, ), in which Frog and Toad express radically different emotions towards the advent of spring:( ) “Toad, Toad,” shouted Frog, “wake up
We developed a pronominal referent-selection task in which direct and indirect speech reports are presented as part of a narrative
The results indicate that children were better at interpreting pronouns in direct speech in the narrative setting of this study compared to the information-transmission setting of Köder and Maier ( )

Summary

Introduction

The paradox of direct speech Consider the following passage from Arnold Lobel’s classic Frog and Toad are Friends (Lobel, ), in which Frog and Toad express radically different emotions towards the advent of spring:. ( ) “Toad, Toad,” shouted Frog, “wake up. It is spring!” “Blah,” said a voice from inside the house. As the passage in ( ) illustrates, speech reports can make up a rather big part of children’s books, and they provide a window into the characters’ thoughts and emotions. In order to understand children’s comprehension of literary texts, it is important to know at what age children are able to understand speech reports and what difficulties they encounter in their acquisition

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Discussion

Conclusion