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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

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Published on: April 19, 2017

Evidentials in Tibetan: acquisition, semantics, and cognitive development.

Jill G de Villiers¹, Jay Garfield, Harper Gernet-Girard

¹Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA. jdevil@smith.edu

New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development

|September 30, 2009

Summary

This study explores Tibetan evidentials and their impact on child language acquisition. Findings reveal how Tibetan children grasp evidential syntax, semantics, and inferential skills.

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Area of Science:

Linguistics
Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Science

Background:

Evidential systems in languages like Tibetan encode information source.
Language acquisition presents challenges, particularly with complex grammatical features such as evidentials.

Purpose of the Study:

To describe the Tibetan evidential system.
To investigate challenges in acquiring evidentials for language development.
To analyze Tibetan children's understanding of evidential syntax and semantics.

Main Methods:

Analysis of linguistic data from Tibetan-speaking children.
Examination of syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials.
Assessment of children's ability to perform point-of-view shifts in questions.

Main Results:

Tibetan children demonstrate understanding of evidential syntactic and semantic features.
Children show competence in the point-of-view shift necessary for evidential use in questions.
Mastery of indirect evidentials correlates with enhanced inferential competence.

Conclusions:

Tibetan evidentials pose specific acquisition challenges.
Children's development of evidential competence is linked to cognitive abilities like inference.
This research offers insights into the intersection of grammar, cognition, and language acquisition.