Perspective shift increases processing effort of pronouns: a comparison between direct and indirect speech

Abstract

This study investigates the processing of deictic pronouns in two types of speech reports, direct speech (Elephant said: “I get the football”) and indirect speech (Elephant said that I get the football). According to Hypothesis 1, pronoun processing in direct speech is more demanding because it requires a perspective shift from the actual to the original speaker. Hypothesis 2 suggests the opposite, based on a previous study that found a positive effect of direct speech on discourse comprehension. In a referent selection task, 116 native speakers of Dutch identified the referents of first-, second- and third-person pronouns in direct and indirect speech. We found higher error rates and longer decision times for pronoun interpretation in direct speech, confirming Hypothesis 1. Furthermore, accuracy depended on the pronoun (most mistakes for he). We discuss how our results can be reconciled with seemingly conflicting evidence that suggests a processing advantage for direct speech.

Keywords:

• direct speech
• indirect speech
• personal pronoun
• perspective shift
• deixis

Acknowledgements

We thank Jelmer van der Linde and Martijn Luinstra for technical and graphic assistance with the stimuli and the Semantics and Cognition group in Groningen, the editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. This research was conducted at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data and research materials

The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/o7bburc

Notes

1. Note that a direct comparison between the results of the ‘no report’ and the ‘speech report’ condition would be complicated by differences in the scenarios and the fact that the ‘no report’ condition always preceded the ‘speech report’ condition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the EU under FP7, ERC Starting Grant [grant number 263890-BLENDS] awarded to Emar Maier and a Vici grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) [grant number 277-70-005] awarded to Petra Hendriks.