Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 29, 2026

An Experimental Analysis of Children's Ability to Provide a False Report about a Crime
Published on: May 3, 2016
The role of evidentiality in Bulgarian children's reliability judgments
1Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. fitneva@queensu.ca
Abstract:
Evidentials are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers. In Bulgarian they provide information about authorship--whether the speaker has personally acquired the information or not--and modality--whether perceptual or cognitive mechanisms were involved in the information's generation. In two experiments, Bulgarian kindergarteners and third-graders (ages 6 and 9, N=96) had to decide which one of two utterances containing different evidentials to believe. Experiment 1 showed that children draw on modality information in their decisions: Third-graders favored perceptual over cognitive and kindergartners cognitive over perceptual sources. Experiment 2 showed that third-graders can also draw on the authorship information carried by evidentials: they favored first- over second-hand information. The discussion focuses on understanding the development of children's use of evidentials.
Related Concept Videos
Reliability and Validity
Eyewitness Memory
One such error is memory distortion, which occurs because human memory does not function like a...
Confirmation Biases
Theory of Attribution I: Correspondent Inference Theory
Understanding Deception
The Representativeness Heuristic
