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Category: Project

Description: Gaining information about people, objects, situations and events is a fundamental aspect of an individuals’ life. Particularly, events include rich information which fosters individuals’ interpretation regarding the world around them. However, the way information about events is obtained could vary depending on the perspective of the observer. Some events can be experienced in its entirety and hence one may learn about them through direct information sources, whereas other events may be learned based on partial information and hence indirect sources of information. The linguistic encoding of information sources is known as evidentiality and languages differ in the kinds of linguistic devices they use to encode evidentiality (Aikhenvald, 2004, 2018). For instance, in English evidentiality is optionally encoded through lexical or syntactic devices (e.g., Apparently, Ali ate the cake). On the other hand, Turkish obligatorily encodes evidentiality using two past tense suffixes (e.g., Ali pastayı yedi/yemiş). Although children start to encode information sources in very early ages, producing indirect evidential marker -mış develops over time (Fitneva, 2018, Matsui, 2014). Furthermore, studies with adults has shown that inferences from visual evidence is not treated as aa homogeneous category and the variation in types of inferential evidence is linked to evidential encoding in language (Sarastli & Papafragou, 2020; Ünal et al., 2016). Nevertheless, we still do not know how indirectness level of an event affects the production of evidential marker particularly in children. The goal of this study is to compare adults’ and children’s production of evidential markers across different types of indirect evidence for events. To address this goal, we will conduct an experiment with adults and children from two different age groups (4- and 5-year-olds and 6- and 7-year-olds). In order to elicit evidential markers participants will watch videos of events and will be asked to describe them.