Reported speech is a natural metalinguistic skill, where the speaker uses language as both an object of thought and a vehicle of communication, with the aim of quoting alienated utterances. In this chapter, a constructivist approach is used to review the involvement of executive functions in the production and comprehension of this linguistic technique, with a special focus on its development in child language. The change of mental spaces involved in any reported speech clause requires a load on executive functions, as well as the involvement of other higher-order socio-cognitive skills to conjugate perspective conflicts.
TopIntroduction
In every language it is possible to talk about speech, a language's ability to represent its own structure and use (Lucy, 1995). One of these most explicit examples is Reported Speech (hereafter RS), the representation of a past, hypothetical, fictitious or inferential statement (linguistic or gestural) in discourse. It canonically involves different types of syntactical structures, such as:
- 1.
The wolf said: “I will blow your house down”.
- 2.
The wolf said he was going to blow their house down.
- 3.
The wolf did: “FWOOSH”
- 4.
The wolf did *BLOWING GESTURE*
The first example has traditionally been categorized as direct speech and the second as indirect speech. In addition, we can find other types of quotations such as paralinguistic (3) or gestural (4), among others. RS has often received the attention of narrative and formal studies, focusing on the stylistic choice between direct and indirect speech, but less from a cognitive point of view. Cummings, in a monograph about RS, puts forward three arguments for this lack of studies: (1) RS, as it will be shown in this chapter, relies on a combination of cognitive and linguistic skills, which are the focus of study in different disciplines but haven’t been specifically dealt by any of them; (2) clinical researchers are usually not aware of the communicative value of RS in social interaction; (3) because of the above two reasons, RS is often excluded from pragmatic evaluations, which usually opt for the assessment of 'simple' verbal and non-verbal behaviours1 (Cummings, 2016).
RS is one of the known as natural metalinguistic abilities, which «represents the cognitive domain where verbal behaviour and executive functioning blend or interact» (Hernández-Sacristán & Serra-Alegre, 2016). Therefore, RS is an area in which role of executive functions and sociocognitive abilities can be analysed in a more transparent way with regard to language development. A view of language development anchored in the framework of usage-based theory may help to better understand the intertwining of both types of skills in the development of this discursive technique.