Sakurai Chikako

This paper examines reported speech in narratives produced by ten four-year-old Japanese children and compares the findings with English-speaking children’s narratives. Focusing on the Japanese “re-enacting mode,” in which reported speech is expressed without explicit framing devices, the study challenges the linguistic determinist view that metarepresentational abilities depend on mastery of morpho-syntactic complementation. The findings suggest that Japanese children’s reported speech reflects language-specific discourse conventions rather than underdeveloped cognitive abilities. The paper argues that metarepresentational development should be evaluated from a broader semiotic and cross-linguistic perspective, taking contextual and cultural factors into account.