Children's understanding of certainty and evidentiality: Advantage of grammaticalized forms over lexical alternatives

Abstract

In verbal communication, the hearer takes advantage of the linguistic expressions of certainty and evidentiality to assess how committed the speaker might be to the truth of the informational content of the utterance. Little is known, however, about the precise developmental mechanism of this ability. In this chapter, we approach the question by elucidating factors that are likely to constrain young children's understanding of linguistically encoded certainty and evidentiality, including the types of linguistic form of these expressions, namely, grammaticalized or lexical forms.

Source vs. Stance: On the Relationship between Evidential and Modal Expressions

“…Similar findings have been reported in child speakers of Bulgarian (Fitneva 2008;) and in Japanese-speaking children and adults (Matsui, Yamamoto & McCagg, 2006;Matsui & Miura, 2009). In Fitneva's studies children were asked to listen to a story about four people, in which Person A asks Person B and C about Person D. Persons B and C answer her question in two different ways using different source markers.…”

The Influence of First‐Hand Testimony and Hearsay on Children's Belief in the Improbable

“…This latter pattern emerged in the current data and is consistent with patterns found among children in other cultures, using different languages, with testimony focused on different topics (Fitneva, ; Matsui et al., ). Our favored interpretation of these patterns, forwarded in the Introduction, is that general social‐cognitive developments underlie these age differences (see also Matsui & Miura, ). Older children construe a speaker's use of an indirect evidential such as “Someone told me [x],” as a sign that the speaker is distancing herself from the source and does not necessarily agree with the source.…”

“…()—across two countries and languages, with testimony that focused on different topics—may reflect general shifts in children's social‐cognitive development. Matsui and Miura () propose that children's understanding of second‐hand evidentials reflects a developing understanding of second‐order mental states (e.g., “She thinks that he thinks …”). As well, we speculate that these age trends partly reflect a developing understanding that speakers may intentionally say things that contradict what they think (Ackerman, ; Filippova & Astington, ; Peterson, Wellman, & Slaughter, ).…”

“…A developing distrust in second-hand testimony (vs. first-hand testimony) found by Fitneva (2008) and Matsui et al (2006)-across two countries and languages, with testimony that focused on different topics-may reflect general shifts in children's social-cognitive development. Matsui and Miura (2009) propose that children's understanding of second-hand evidentials reflects a developing understanding of second-order mental states (e.g., "She thinks that he thinks . .…”

Reassessing the conceptual–procedural distinction

“…If the function of connectives such as but and so is to activate such procedures, this would help to explain why their meanings are relatively inaccessible to consciousness and are notoriously hard to pin down in conceptual terms (Wilson and Sperber 1993:16). 8 Moreover, the idea that acquisition of conceptual expressions depends on the availability of the associated concepts while acquisition of procedural expressions depends on the availability of the associated procedures may shed some light on subtle differences in the acquisition of grammaticalised vs. lexicalised expressions such as those discussed by Matsui and Miura (2009) and Matsui et al (this issue).…”