Understanding different sources of information: the acquisition of evidentiality

Abstract

This paper investigates six- to nine-year-old children's acquisition of evidentiality. In two minimally different tasks we assess whether children can be made to use a particular source of information by presenting them with a specific evidential term. That is, we assess whether children have an explicit awareness of the source requirement of the evidential terms. The results demonstrate that children explicitly understand the direct evidential term, but not the indirect evidential terms. Interestingly, the direct evidential term tested (Dutch lijken) does not encode high speaker certainty. Hence, even though the child cannot rely on speaker certainty to provide an answer, the results still show that direct evidentiality is acquired before indirect evidentiality.