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Related Experiment Videos

Evidentiality in language and cognition.

Anna Papafragou1, Peggy Li, Youngon Choi

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, 109 Wolf Hall, Newark, DE 19716, USA. papafragou@psych.udel.edu

Cognition
|May 19, 2006
PubMed
Summary

Children learning evidentiality (how information source is linguistically encoded) face challenges with comprehension, not conceptual understanding. Their reasoning about information sources develops similarly regardless of language, suggesting language acquisition doesn't dictate early reasoning.

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Investigates the relationship between language and thought, specifically how linguistic and conceptual representations interact during language acquisition.
  • Focuses on the acquisition of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of information source, and its connection to children's reasoning about these sources.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test hypotheses on whether the abstract nature of evidentiality complicates acquisition or if grammatical marking in languages like Korean aids early reasoning.
  • To compare the development of evidential reasoning in children learning Korean (with evidential morphology) versus English (without grammaticalized evidentiality).

Main Methods:

  • Experimental studies comparing 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's understanding of evidential morphemes with their non-linguistic source monitoring abilities.

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  • Comparison of Korean children's source monitoring skills with those of age-matched English-speaking children.

    • Main Results:

    • Korean children demonstrated success in producing evidential morphology but showed fragile comprehension.
    • Young Korean speakers exhibited strong non-linguistic reasoning about information sources, performing similarly to English-speaking peers.
    • Acquisition of evidential expressions presents learning difficulties, but these are not necessarily conceptual.

    Conclusions:

    • Children's ability to reason about information sources develops similarly across diverse language learners, independent of specific linguistic markers.
    • Findings challenge relativistic views, suggesting conceptual development in source monitoring is not strictly tied to the grammatical features of the exposure language.
    • Implications for understanding the interplay between linguistic input and conceptual representation during child development.