On the moving word task 3- to 4-year-olds judge that a face-up written word changes in what it 'says' when moved from alongside a matching object to a nonmatching object. Bialystok (2000) interprets these errors as symptomatic of a misconception that words' meanings are flexible, and argues that surmounting this misconception is a prerequisite to reading. On the false word task 3- to 4-year-olds judge that a face-down word changes in what it says in line with a change to its referent. Thomas and colleagues (1999) argue that children make these errors because they assume that words physically change. Two experiments compared 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on face-up and facedown versions of the two tasks. Consistent with Bialystok's interpretation, children made errors on both tasks for face-up words, and consistent with Thomas and colleagues' interpretation, children were more likely to make errors for face-down words on the false word task and the moving word task employed in Experiment 2. Six experiments compared 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on the face-up moving word task with modified tasks. Children were less likely to treat face-up words' meanings as flexible on three new tasks: in the reverse task a word was moved from alongside a nonmatching object to a matching object; in the word exchange task two words were exchanged from matching objects to nonmatching objects; and when asked to make print say something different in the card tum task, children responded as if they assumed that the word's physical form needed to be changed rather than its pictorial context. The findings suggest that errors for face-up words are not indicative of a misconception, instead, they are maximised by demands intrinsic to the task. It is argued that, as with other representations, young children assume that words' meanings are fixed, but this understanding is fragile and can be overridden. With increasing familiarity with written words, children become better able to resist making errors for face-up words.

This thesis seeks to provide a cognitive account of the speech act of assertion and its relationship to the indicative mood. It starts by critically reviewing the literature on assertion and the uses to which it has been put in linguistic and philosophical research. Through this review, key issues relating to assertion and mood are identified. These are then addressed in subsequent chapters. The second chapter lays the ground for a cognitive account of assertion and the indicative. It outlines the theoretical framework employed (Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory) and considers to what extent this is challenged by claims discussed in the previous chapter regarding the primacy of assertion over a conception of belief. Then, two distinct types of mental representation are identified according to whether or not they aim at consistency. This distinction is crucial to the third chapter, in which a new relevance-theoretic account of the indicative mood is developed and the conditions under which it can result in assertoric effects are identified. This follows a discussion of previous relevance-theoretic approaches to mood, in which it is argued that the approach adopted of matching moods to world-types cannot adequately explain the lack of assertoric potential of non-indicatives. The new approach rests on the claim that indicatives are unique in presenting the proposition expressed as potentially relevant in its own right in a context. Assertoric effects result when this potential is exploited so that the proposition expressed is presented as relevant in its own right to an individual. The final chapter throws the analysis of the indicative into relief by proposing an account of the Spanish subjunctive predicated on the claim that this form is incapable of presenting the proposition expressed as relevant in its own right.

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