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.

Referential Dependencies Between Conflicting Attitudes.

A number of puzzles about propositional attitudes in semantics and philosophy revolve around apparent referential dependencies between different attitudes within a single agent's mental state. In a series of papers, Hans Kamp (2003… 2015) offers a general framework for describing such interconnected attitude complexes, building on DRT and dynamic semantics. I demonstrate that Kamp's proposal cannot deal with referential dependencies between semantically conflicting attitudes, such as those in Ninan's (21) puzzle about de re imagination. To solve the problem I propose to replace Kamp's treatment of attitudes as context change potentials with a two-dimensional analysis.

Attitudes and Mental Files in Discourse Representation Theory.

I present a concrete DRT-based syntax and semantics for the representation of mental states in the style of Kamp (1990). This system is closely related to Recanati's (2012) Mental Files framework, but adds a crucial distinction between anchors, the analogues of mental files, and attitudes like belief, desire and imagination. Attitudes are represented as separate compartments that can be referentially dependent on anchors. I show how the added distinctions help defend the useful notion of an acquaintance-based mental file against Ninan's (Inquiry 58(4):368-377 2015) recent challenge involving counterfactual de re attitudes.

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.