A study investigated how children report epistemic modality and focused on two main questions: (1) How do children reproduce modal devices that are present in the original (to-be-reported) discourse? and (2) How do children use different linguistic means of quotation--direct, indirect, or other--in this situation? Sixty monolingual French-speaking subjects, 4-8 years old, were presented with short films involving verbal interactions among four puppets (two animals, a boy, and a girl). In each scenario, a particular target action was performed by one of the animals. Shortly after, the boy uttered a statement that referred to this target action and accused one of the animals. Children were asked to narrate the films to someone who had not seen the films. When reporting statements, children used lexical substitutions. In their alternative answers, many of the children suspended the assertion in ways that completely transformed the sentence structure. Evidence suggested that younger children do not have the same means of expression as older students. With respect to the use of different types of quotations, the age of the subjects did not seem to account for the frequencies with which they used direct versus indirect quotations. (DJD)