Evidentials in Tibetan: Acquisition, semantics, and cognitive development

Villiers, Jill G. de; Garfield, Jay L.; Gernet-Girard, Harper; Roeper, Thomas; Speas, Margaret

doi:10.1002/cd.248

Cited by 31 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Our data confirm the presence of strong cross-linguistic differences in the way adults encode evidentiality in language (and complements developmental studies in Aksu & Slobin, 1986;Aksu-Koç, 1988, 2000Aksu-Koç et al, 2009;Choi, 1995;Fitneva, 2009;Ozturk & Papafragou, in press;Papafragou, Li, Choi, & Han, 2007;Ünal & Papafragou, 2013, submitted for publication; de Villiers, Garfield, Gernet-Girard, Roeper, & Speas, 2009, see Matsui, 2014 for a review). The present data lead naturally to the question of whether the cross-linguistic differences in source encoding for these events would be reflected in Turkish and English speakers' event source memory.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 71%

Untitled

2016

Preprint

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a b s t r a c tWhen monitoring the origins of their memories, people tend to mistakenly attribute memories generated from internal processes (e.g., imagination, visualization) to perception. Here, we ask whether speaking a language that obligatorily encodes the source of information might help prevent such errors. We compare speakers of English to speakers of Turkish, a language that obligatorily encodes information source (direct/perceptual vs. indirect/hearsay or inference) for past events. In our experiments, participants reported having seen events that they had only inferred from post-event visual evidence. In general, error rates were higher when visual evidence that gave rise to inferences was relatively close to direct visual evidence. Furthermore, errors persisted even when participants were asked to report the specific sources of their memories. Crucially, these error patterns were equivalent across language groups, suggesting that speaking a language that obligatorily encodes source of information does not increase sensitivity to the distinction between perception and inference in event memory.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 71%

Untitled

2016

Preprint

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“…In languages with evidential marking, such as Turkish, Bulgarian, Tibetan and Quechua, utterances are syntactically marked to indicate how the information was acquired (Aikhenvald, 2004; J. G. de Villiers, Garfield, Gernet-Girard, Roeper, & Speas, 2009; Faller, 2002; Fitneva, 2001; Johanson & Utas, 2000; Smirnova, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking about seeing: Perceptual sources of knowledge are encoded in the theory of mind brain regions of sighted and blind adults

2014

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Blind people's inferences about how other people see provide a window into fundamental questions about the human capacity to think about one another's thoughts. By working with blind individuals, we can ask both what kinds of representations people form about others’ minds, and how much these representations depend on the observer having had similar mental states themselves. Thinking about others’ mental states depends on a specific group of brain regions, including the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ). We investigated the representations of others’ mental states in these brain regions, using multivoxel pattern analyses (MVPA). We found that, first, in the RTPJ of sighted adults, the pattern of neural response distinguished the source of the mental state (did the protagonist see or hear something?) but not the valence (did the protagonist feel good or bad?). Second, these neural representations were preserved in congenitally blind adults. These results suggest that the temporo-parietal junction contains explicit, abstract representations of features of others’ mental states, including the perceptual source. The persistence of these representations in congenitally blind adults, who have no first-person experience with sight, provides evidence that these representations emerge even in the absence of first-person perceptual experiences.

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“…Studies so far have been done mostly on the acquisition of Turkish (Aksu-Koç & Alici, 2000) and Korean (Choi, 1995) evidentials, with less work on Bulgarian (Fitneva, 2007) and Tibetan (de Villiers, Garfield, Gernet-Girard, Speas & Roeper, 2009). The morphemes are used by young children (>2), but not systematically understood in experimental tasks until considerably later.…”

Section: Acquisition Of Evidentialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of Mind and evidentiality in Romani-Bulgarian bilingual children

Kyuchukov

Villiers

2009

Psychology of Language and Communication

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The paper reports two studies of the development of false belief reasoning in bilingual Roma children in Bulgaria. No previous work has considered Roma children. Two studies were conducted, and in the second study the Roma children spoke a dialect of Romani that contains evidential markers, as does Bulgarian, their second language. Results reveal no advantage of bilingualism, and similar results with age to that found in other groups across the world. The bilingual group had better understanding of evidentials than the monolingual Bulgarian group, possibly related to the linguistic character of the markings. There is contradictory evidence about the relation of ToM and understanding of evidentiality.

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Evidentials in Tibetan: Acquisition, semantics, and cognitive development

Cited by 31 publications

References 14 publications

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Thinking about seeing: Perceptual sources of knowledge are encoded in the theory of mind brain regions of sighted and blind adults

Theory of Mind and evidentiality in Romani-Bulgarian bilingual children

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