Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T04:52:51.464Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The role of evidentiality in Bulgarian children's reliability judgments*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2008

STANKA A. FITNEVA
STANKA A. FITNEVA*
Affiliation:
Queen's University
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 2N6, Canada. Email: fitneva@queensu.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Evidentials are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers. In Bulgarian they provide information about authorship – whether the speaker has personally acquired the information or not – and modality – whether perceptual or cognitive mechanisms were involved in the information's generation. In two experiments, Bulgarian kindergarteners and third-graders (ages 6 and 9, N=96) had to decide which one of two utterances containing different evidentials to believe. Experiment 1 showed that children draw on modality information in their decisions: Third-graders favored perceptual over cognitive and kindergartners cognitive over perceptual sources. Experiment 2 showed that third-graders can also draw on the authorship information carried by evidentials: they favored first- over second-hand information. The discussion focuses on understanding the development of children's use of evidentials.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , November 2008 , pp. 845 - 868
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

The research was supported by grants from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Study and the Cognitive Studies Program at Cornell University. Special thanks to Stephen J. Ceci, Frank C. Keil and Sally MacConnell-Ginet for helpful discussions of the project, to Ana Raikova, Pepi Kolarova and Nedyalka Fileva for facilitating its completion, and to Mark Sabbagh for penetrating comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

References

REFERENCES

Aksu-Koç, A. (1988). The acquisition of tense and aspect in Turkish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Barnes, J. (1984). Evidentials in the Tuyuca verb. International Journal of American Linguistics 50(3), 255–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bodenhausen, G. V., Kramer, G. P. & Susser, K. (1994). Happiness and stereotypic thinking in social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66(4), 621–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruner, J. S. (1966). An overview. In Bruner, J. S., Olver, R. R., Greenfield, P. M. et al. (eds), Studies in cognitive growth, 319–26. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Feinstein, J. A., Blair, W. & Jarvis, G. (1996). Dispositional differences in cognitive motivation: The life and times of individuals varying in need for cognition. Psychological Bulletin 119(2), 197–253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carey, V., Zeger, S. L. & Diggle, P. (1993). Modelling multivariate binary data with alternating logistic regressions. Biometrika 80(3), 517–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpendale, J. I. & Chandler, M. J. (1996). On the distinction between false belief understanding and subscribing to an interpretive theory of mind. Child Development 67(4), 1686–706.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ceci, S. J., Ross, D. F. & Toglia, M. P. (1987). Suggestibility of children's memory: Psychological implications. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 116, 38–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chafe, W. (1986). Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing. In Chafe, W. & Nichols, J. (eds), Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 261–72. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. & Nichols, J. (eds) (1986). Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Choi, S. (1991). Early acquisition of epistemic meanings in Korean: A study of sentence-ending suffixes in the spontaneous speech of three children. First Language 11, 93–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choi, S. (1995). The development of epistemic sentence-ending modal forms and functions in Korean children. In Bybee, J. & Fleischman, S. (eds), Modality in grammar and discourse, 165–204. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comrie, B. (2000). Evidentials: Semantics and history. In Johanson, L. & Utas, B. (eds), Evidentials: Turkic, Iranian and neighboring languages (Vol. 24), 1–12. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Fitneva, S. A. (2001). Epistemic marking and reliability judgments: Evidence from Bulgarian. Journal of Pragmatics 33, 401–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gigerenzer, G. & Goldstein, D. G. (1996). Reasoning the fast and frugal way: Models of bounded rationality. Psychological Review 103(4), 650–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harris, P. L. (2002). Checking our sources: the origins of trust in testimony. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33A(2), 315–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirst, W. & Weil, J. (1982). Acquisition of epistemic and deontic meaning of modals. Journal of Child Language 9, 659–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Horie, K. & Taira, K. (2002). Where Korean and Japanese differ: Modality vs. discourse modality. In Akatsuka, N., Strauss, S. & Comrie, B. (eds), Japanese/Korean linguistics (Vol. 10), 178–91. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Jaswal, V. K. & Neely, L. A. (2006). Adults don't always know best: Preschoolers use past reliability over age when learning new words. Psychological Science 17(9), 757–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, M. K., Hashtroudi, S. & Lindsay, D. S. (1993). Source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin 114(1), 3–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kamio, A. (1995). Territory of information in English and Japanese and psychological utterances. Journal of Pragmatics 24(3), 235–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koenig, M. A. & Harris, P. L. (2005). Preschoolers mistrust ignorant and inaccurate speakers. Child Development 76(6), 1261–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kumkale, G. T. & Albarracin, D. (2004). The sleeper effect in persuasion: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin 130(1), 143–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Markman, A. B. & Medin, D. L. (2002). Decision making. In Medin, D. L. & Pashler, H. (eds), Stevens handbook of experimental psychology (Vol. 2), 413–66. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Matsui, T., Yamamoto, T. & McCagg, P. (2006). On the role of language in children's early understanding of others as epistemic beings. Cognitive Development 21, 159–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, P., Robinson, E. J., Isaacs, J. E. & Nye, R. M. (1996). Contamination in reasoning about false belief: An instance of realist bias in adults but not children. Cognition 59(1), 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, C., Bryant, D. & Furrow, D. (1989). Mental terms and the development of certainty. Child Development 60, 167–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, C., Pure, K. & Furrow, D. (1990). Children's understanding of the modal expressions of speaker certainty and uncertainty and its relation to the development of a representational theory of mind. Child Development 61, 722–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noveck, I. A., Ho, S. & Sera, M. (1996). Children's understanding of epistemic modals. Journal of Child Language 23, 621–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Neill, D. K., Astington, J. W. & Flavell, J. H. (1992). Young children's understanding of the role that sensory experiences play in knowledge acquisition. Child Development 63, 474–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Papafragou, A., Li, P., Choi, Y. & Han, C.-H. (2007). Evidentiality in language and cognition. Cognition 103, 253–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Pillow, B. H. & Henrichon, A. J. (1996). There's more to the picture than meets the eye: Young children's difficulty understanding biased interpretation. Child Development 67, 803–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, E. J., Champion, H. & Mitchell, P. (1999). Children's ability to infer utterance veracity from speaker informedness. Developmental Psychology 35(2), 535–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Robinson, E. J., Mitchell, P. & Nye, R. (1995). Young children's treating of utterances as unreliable sources of knowledge. Journal of Child Language 22, 663–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Robinson, E. J. & Whitcombe, E. L. (2003). Children's suggestibility in relation to their understanding about sources of knowledge. Child Development 74(1), 48–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, L. (1984). Young children's understanding of attributes and dimensions: A comparison of conceptual and linguistic measures. Child Development 55(2), 363–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science 211, 453–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Whitcombe, E. L. & Robinson, E. J. (2000). Children's decisions about what to believe and their ability to report the source of their belief. Cognitive Development 15(3), 329–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willett, T. (1988). A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12, 51–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar