Evidentiality in language and cognition

Abstract

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3-and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable ☆ We wish to thank Lila Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, Eleni Miltsakaki, and the other members of the CHEESE seminar at the University of Pennsylvania for discussion of this project. Thanks also to Seungyun Yang for experimental help. This research was partly supported by NIH/NRSA Grants #F32MH065020 to Anna Papafragou and #1F32HD043532 to Peggy Li and by SSHRC Grant #410-2003-0544 to Chung-hye Han. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: papafragou@psych.udel.edu ,pegs@wjh.harvard.edu, youngonc@sas.upenn.edu, chunghye@sfu.ca. 15 Again, the basic results do not change regardless of the which linguistic score was compared with which non-linguistic score. There is always an effect of Task (Non-linguistic better than Linguistic), and always an effect of Task × Age (with a larger Age effect for Nonlinguistic than Linguistic tasks). 24 Such mapping problems have been originally pointed out and discussed in the context of learning procedures for mental verbs (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999;Gleitman, 1990;Papafragou, Cassidy, Gleitman, & Hulbert, 2004;Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004). As these authors point out, observational cues to the meaning of mental verbs such as think or believe are few and impoverished compared to those for action verbs such as catch or eat. On at least some occas...

Theory of Mind and evidentiality in Romani-Bulgarian bilingual children

“…For example, Aksu-Koç (1988) found Turkish monolinguals understood the witnessed form (-dI) at about age 4-5, but the unwitnessed form (mIs) only at age six. Similar findings are reported by and Papafrago, Li, Choi and Han (2007) for Korean. Fitneva (2007Fitneva ( , 2008 found Bulgarian monolinguals understood the contrasts at age six, though imperfectly.…”

Production–comprehension asymmetries and the acquisition of evidential morphology

“…This pattern has been previously noted in the developmental literature (Aksu-Koç, 1988;Ozturk & Papafragou, 2015;Papafragou, Li, Choi, & Han, 2007), but its origins have not been systematically explored. Our goal is to offer new, more robust empirical evidence for the asymmetry focusing on the acquisition of evidential morphology in Turkish; more importantly, we seek to evaluate the relative contribution of methodological demands and the psycholinguistic properties of evidentiality to children's comprehension difficulties.…”

“…A further study by Papafragou et al (2007) showed that this asymmetry is not language-specific. In that study, 3-and 4-year-old Korean children were quite successful in producing both a direct (-e) and an indirect/reportative morpheme (-tay); nevertheless, children had difficulty in a ''who-said-it" task measuring evidential comprehension.…”

“…In fact, experimental studies have revealed that, across languages, full semantic and pragmatic understanding of evidentiality does not develop until the end of the kindergarten years, and sometimes even later (see Matsui, 2014 for a review; cf. Aksu-Koç, 1988;Aksu-Koç, Ögel-Balaban, & Alp, 2009;Choi, 1995;de Villiers, Garfield, Gernet-Girard, Roeper, & Speas, 2009;Fitneva, 2009;Ozturk & Papafragou, 2007Papafragou et al, 2007;Ünal & Papafragou, 2013a). Importantly for present purposes, children in many of these studies consistently fail on comprehension tasks, despite the fact that they can reliably produce the evidential morphemes in speech (e.g., Aksu-Koç, 1988;Ozturk & Papafragou, 2015;Papafragou et al, 2007).…”

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

“…CHILDES). It has grappled with a much broader typological slice of languages and has covered a range of linguistic phenomena that have been barely or not at all yet addressed in adult processing research, for example, evidentiality (Aksu & Slobin, 1986;Fitnever & Matsui, 2009 and papers therein;Papafragou, Li, Choi & Han, 2007), ergativity (Allen, 1996;Bavin, 1992;Bavin & Stoll, 2013;Fortescue & Olsen, 1992;Imidadze & Tuite, 1992;Narasimhan, 2005;Ochs, 1982;Pye, 1990Pye, , 1992Slobin, 1985Slobin, , 1992Van Valin, 1992), and serial verb constructions (Fung, 2011;Lee & Naigles, 2005).…”