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...

An eye-tracking study explored Korean speaking adults' and 4-5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children but not adults had difficulty recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong disambiguating evidence at the end of the sentence. These findings are notable for their striking similarities with findings from children parsing English; yet in those and other studies of English, children were found to be reluctant to use late-arriving syntactic evidence to override earlier verb-based cues to structure whereas here Korean children were reluctant to use late-arriving verb-based cues to override earlier syntactic evidence. The findings implicate a general cross-linguistic pattern for parsing development, in which late developing cognitive control abilities mediate the recovery from so-called 'garden-path' sentences. Children's limited cognitive control prevents them from inhibiting misinterpretations even when the disambiguating evidence comes from highly informative verb information.

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