Culturally constituted universals: Evidential basis of belief matters

Differences in the sequence with which children pass the tasks in Wellman and Liu's (2004) theory of mind (ToM) battery is increasingly bringing into question the universal and cultural specifics of children's developing understanding of others' minds. Children from China, Iran, and Turkey pass the knowledge access (KA) task of the battery earlier than they pass the diverse beliefs (DB) task (e.g., Selcuk et al., 2018). This pattern is the reverse of what has been documented with children from Australia and the US (e.g., Peterson et al., 2005). This paper presents three studies with Turkish samples that explore the possible reasons for developmental sequence and performance differences in the ToM battery. Study 1 investigated Turkish-speaking adults' judgments of appropriateness for different epistemic verbs as used in the DB and false belief (FB) tasks. Study 2 investigated whether adults' performance (i.e., accuracy, reaction time) on FB tasks were affected by culturally preferred uses of these verbs. Collectively these studies showed that adults found different epistemic language ("guess," "think," and the Turkish-specific "falsely think") to be appropriate for different belief-based tasks. However, there was no difference in adults' performance based on epistemic language. In Study 3, Turkish-speaking preschoolers' performance in belief-related tasks based on variations in epistemic language and epistemic features (i.e., presence of evidence) was investigated. Among five modifications, Turkish children benefited only from a modification that involved the manipulation of the epistemological basis for ambiguous beliefs (i.e., visual evidence for belief). RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Turkish adults find different epistemic language ("guess," "think," and the Turkish-specific "falsely-think") to be appropriate for different belief-based tasks (diverse and false belief tasks). Turkish adults' performance on false belief (FB) tasks is not affected by epistemic language. Turkish children perform better in diverse beliefs (DB) task if an epistemological basis for ambiguous beliefs (i.e., visual evidence for either belief) is provided.

Knowledge and belief in the times of COVID-19: A comparative analysis of epistemicity in English newspaper discourse of two stages of the pandemic

This paper sets forth a quantitative analysis of expressions of epistemicity, a category covering the expression of commitment to the information transmitted and comprising epistemic modality and evidentiality, in a corpus of 400 newspaper articles from The Guardian concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. 200 articles were written in April 2020; the other 200 were written between January and April 2022, after massive vaccination and an extraordinary increase in medical knowledge. The analysis distinguishes between a number of subtypes of epistemic expressions and three kinds of authorial voice. The results show that the April 2020 articles contain more epistemic expressions, of both weak commitment (might, perhaps, apparently…) and strong commitment (know, clearly, surely…), which suggests a greater need to distinguish the known from the unknown in this period, due to the pervasive state of uncertainty. The analysis has social implications, since it gives readers an opportunity to appreciate the careful assessments of epistemicity found in the corpus and therefore to consider the convenience of obtaining information from quality media. These social implications, together with the methodology of the analysis, contribute to the potential of the paper for pedagogical applications.

A cross-linguistic approach to children's reasoning: Turkish- and English-speaking children's use of metatalk

When collaboratively solving problems, children discuss information reliability, for example, whether claims are based on direct or indirect observation, termed as "metatalk". Unlike English in which evidential marking is optional, languages with obligatory evidential marking such as Turkish, might provide children some advantages in communicating the reliability of their claims. The current preregistered online study investigated Turkish- and English-speaking 3- and 5-year-old children's (N = 144) use of metatalk. The child and the experimenter (E) were asked to decide in which of the two houses a toy was hiding. One house had the toy's footprints. When E left the Zoom meeting, an informant told the child that the toy was in the other house without the footprints in three within-subjects conditions. In the direct-observation condition, the child witnessed the informant move the toy. In the indirect-witness condition, the informant checked both houses and said that the toy was in the other house. In the indirect-hearsay condition, the informant simply said that the toy was in the other house. When E returned, the child had to convince E about how they knew the toy was in the other house using metatalk (e.g., "I saw it move"). Turkish-speaking children used metatalk more often than did English-speaking children, especially in the direct-observation condition. In the two indirect conditions, both groups of 5-year-olds were similar in their use of metatalk, but Turkish speaking 3-year-olds produced metatalk more often than did English-speaking 3-year-olds. Thus, languages with obligatory evidential marking might facilitate children's collaborative reasoning. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children as young as 3 years of age can produce metatalk. Turkish-speaking children produce metatalk more often than English-speaking children. The difference between the two linguistic groups is more pronounced at age 3.

Narrative Elicitation as Ethnography: Methodological Insights From the Examination of Children's Perspective Marking in Amdo Tibetan

This paper employs a case study with Amdo Tibetan children to demonstrate the benefits of narrative elicitation for ethnographic language socialization research in under-studied languages. Primarily by examining spontaneous verbal interaction, existing language socialization research has demonstrated how salient grammatical resources shape children's understanding of cultural belief systems pertaining to sociality and the appropriate display of emotion. However, spontaneous data do not always capture children's full linguistic repertoires and competencies, and may therefore present a partial picture of their mastery over particular grammatical systems. One such area that remains to be studied is how children use interactional cues to build their emerging knowledge of grammatical perspective marking in Tibetan languages. This paper integrates narrative elicitation with ethnographic methods from language socialization to examine how Amdo Tibetan children mark perspective using evidentiality, the grammatically-obligatory encoding of knowledge source, an area not frequently documented in language socialization studies. Language socialization research involved 15-months of participant observation, audio-video recording, and analysis of spontaneous interactions with children aged 1–4. This ethnographic research found that adults' narratives highlighted local theories about the importance of compassion (Tib. snying rje) by using grammatical evidentiality to emphasize characters' direct experiences in the story-world. However, grammatical evidentiality was under-represented in children's spontaneous talk. To provide further insight into children's mastery of evidentiality in this culturally salient communicative genre, I conducted narrative elicitation tasks with seven Amdo Tibetan children, aged 2–7. By framing narrative elicitation tasks as forums for social interaction in family homes, I adapted a method traditionally used in experimentation to complement the study of naturalistic interaction. Interaction analysis of the elicited narratives found that family members positioned young children as novice narrators, leading to dialogic rather than monologic narratives. Young children co-constructed shared perspectives on narrated events, and used evidentiality in conventionalized ways by mirroring the grammatical forms of adults' previous utterances. By adapting narrative elicitation tasks to language socialization's ethnographic methods, this paper models how qualitative researchers can locate patterns in children's experiences of language across complementary settings of data collection, an endeavor that is particularly important to research with child speakers of under-documented languages.

Functions of Turkish evidentials in early child-caregiver interactions: a growth curve analysis of longitudinal data

In languages with evidential marking, utterances consist of an informational content and a specification of the mode of access to that information. In this first longitudinal study investigating the acquisition of the Turkish evidential marker -mIş in naturalistic child-caregiver interactions, we examined six children between 8 and 36 months of age. We charted individual differences in child and caregiver speech over time by conducting growth curve analyses. Children followed a similar course of acquisition in terms of the proportion of the marker in overall speech. However, children exhibited differences with respect to the order of emergence of different evidential functions (e.g., inference, hearsay), where each child showed a unique pattern irrespective of the frequency in caregiver input. Nonfactual use of the marker was very frequent in child and caregiver speech, where high-SES caregivers mostly produced the marker during story-telling and pretend play, and low-SES caregivers for regulating the child's behavior.

Intonation and Evidentiality in Spanish Polar Interrogatives

Three different nuclear pitch accents can be found in Castilian Spanish polar interrogatives. In addition to the 'canonical' low-rise pattern, there are two marked interrogative contours featuring high-rise and rise-fall pitch accents. The aim of this paper is to explain how each contour contributes to the interpretation of the utterance in which they occur. I argue that this contribution is to be sought at the semantic, not at the pragmatic-illocutionary, attitudinal-level. My proposal is that the low-rise contour is the expression of unspecified sentence polarity (corresponding to the interrogative operator), whereas the two marked contours add indications about the information source-that is, they encode evidential distinctions. The high-rise pattern indicates that the Self is the source of the information; the rise-fall tone indicates that Other is the source. The whole range of pragmatic interpretations that have been described in the literature can be easily accommodated into the present proposal as inferential developments of the encoded meaning together with contextual information. This view has implications for a theory of interrogatives, for the phonology of intonation and for the articulation of the semantics/pragmatics interface.

Experimental Evidence for the Role of Intonation in Evidential Marking

This paper investigates the role of intonation in the marking of directly-perceived information in Majorcan Catalan polar questions. We conducted a perception experiment in which a total of 72 participants were introduced to a set of twins who were exposed to different types of evidence for a given p(roposition). One twin inferred p based on direct sensory information (via one of the five senses), while the other had been told that p by a third party, that is, reported information. Participants listened to a set of discourse contexts that ended in critical stimuli with three attested combinations of particle/intonation in this variety of Catalan: (1) polar questions produced with a falling nuclear contour ¡H+L* L%; (2) polar questions headed with the particle que 'that' produced with ¡H+L* L%; and (3) polar questions headed with the particle que and produced with a rise-fall L+H* L%. After hearing the stimulus, participants had to decide which of the twins had uttered the question-the one who inferred a proposition ( p) based on direct sensory information or the one who had been told p by a third party. The results show that listeners very consistently associate the que + L+H* L% combination with inferences drawn from direct sensory evidence as opposed to reported evidence. This shows that particles may work in tandem with intonation to convey the information source. Importantly, we show that intonation is a part of grammar that may be recruited for evidential strategies.

A characterization of verb use in Turkish agrammatic narrative speech

This study investigates the characteristics of narrative-speech production and the use of verbs in Turkish agrammatic speakers (n = 10) compared to non-brain-damaged controls (n = 10). To elicit narrative-speech samples, personal interviews and storytelling tasks were conducted. Turkish has a large and regular verb inflection paradigm where verbs are inflected for evidentiality (i.e. direct versus indirect evidence available to the speaker). Particularly, we explored the general characteristics of the speech samples (e.g. utterance length) and the uses of lexical, finite and non-finite verbs and direct and indirect evidentials. The results show that speech rate is slow, verbs per utterance are lower than normal and the verb diversity is reduced in the agrammatic speakers. Verb inflection is relatively intact; however, a trade-off pattern between inflection for direct evidentials and verb diversity is found. The implications of the data are discussed in connection with narrative-speech production studies on other languages.

Looking at the evidence in visual world: eye-movements reveal how bilingual and monolingual Turkish speakers process grammatical evidentiality

This study presents pioneering data on how adult early bilinguals (heritage speakers) and late bilingual speakers of Turkish and German process grammatical evidentiality in a visual world setting in comparison to monolingual speakers of Turkish. Turkish marks evidentiality, the linguistic reference to information source, through inflectional affixes signaling either direct (-DI) or indirect (-mIş) evidentiality. We conducted an eye-tracking-during-listening experiment where participants were given access to visual ‘evidence’ supporting the use of either a direct or indirect evidential form. The behavioral results indicate that the monolingual Turkish speakers comprehended direct and indirect evidential scenarios equally well. In contrast, both late and early bilinguals were less accurate and slower to respond to direct than to indirect evidentials. The behavioral results were also reflected in the proportions of looks data. That is, both late and early bilinguals fixated less frequently on the target picture in the direct than in the indirect evidential condition while the monolinguals showed no difference between these conditions. Taken together, our results indicate reduced sensitivity to the semantic and pragmatic function of direct evidential forms in both late and early bilingual speakers, suggesting a simplification of the Turkish evidentiality system in Turkish heritage grammars. We discuss our findings with regard to theories of incomplete acquisition and first language attrition.

The Interface of Language and Theory of Mind

The proposal is made that the interface between language and theory of mind is bidirectional. It seems probable that the conceptual developments of early Theory of Mind form an essential basis for helping to fix at least word reference. In development from two to four years, no basis exists in research for conclusions about the direction of influence between language and Theory of Mind. At the stage of false belief reasoning, after age four, the role of the mastery of syntactic complementation is highlighted as a representational tool, that is, language development assists reasoning. The paper presents a brief summary of Theory of Mind, ranging from its earliest beginnings in infancy to the appreciation around age four years that others might hold false beliefs and act according to them. For each development, the parallel language developments are described, and questions are raised about the interface between the two. In particular, research that might determine the direction of influence from one to the other is discussed. More work is called for, especially with nonverbal tasks, good experimental linguistic work, and other special populations, that might allow a more precise delineation of how language and Theory of Mind interrelate at the interface.