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Understanding different sources of information: the acquisition of evidentiality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2014

LOES KORING  and
HANNAH DE MULDER
LOES KORING*
Affiliation:
Utrecht University, the Netherlands
HANNAH DE MULDER
Affiliation:
Utrecht University, the Netherlands
*
Address for correspondence: Loes Koring, Macquarie University, Department of Cognitive Science, Australian Hearing Hub, 16 University Avenue, NSW 2109, Australia. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper investigates six- to nine-year-old children's acquisition of evidentiality. In two minimally different tasks we assess whether children can be made to use a particular source of information by presenting them with a specific evidential term. That is, we assess whether children have an explicit awareness of the source requirement of the evidential terms. The results demonstrate that children explicitly understand the direct evidential term, but not the indirect evidential terms. Interestingly, the direct evidential term tested (Dutch lijken) does not encode high speaker certainty. Hence, even though the child cannot rely on speaker certainty to provide an answer, the results still show that direct evidentiality is acquired before indirect evidentiality.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 5 , September 2015 , pp. 947 - 968
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

The research reported was made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, Nr. 021.001.087) to L. K. We would like to thank the children and teachers from Montessorischool Arcade and Montessori BS Houten (Vikingenpoort) for their participation. In addition, we would like to thank Iris Mulders and Theo Veenker for their help in setting up the experiment. Further, many thanks go to Andrea Gualmini for his help in creating the design of the experiment. We would also like to thank Pim Mak, Eric Reuland, Nina Hyams, Sharon Unsworth, and Sergio Baauw for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, Mattis van den Bergh and Huub van den Bergh for their help on the statistical analyses, and Lea ter Meulen for her help in coding the data. Finally, we would like to thank the audiences of On Linguistic Interfaces, Language Culture and Mind IV, the participants of the UCLA acquisition of semantics seminar, and the acquisition lab meeting in Groningen for useful comments.

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