ABSTRACT

The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with others’ authority or mental perspective, where “others” stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the experimenter or someone in the props). However, these studies have yet to detect the age at which children eventually align with adults in comprehending the grammatical structure encoding the evidential interpretation when it is syntactically encoded. The comprehension study reported in this article has taken the aforementioned factors into consideration and has involved a large number of Greek-speaking children between second and fifth grades, along with an adult control group, to investigate syntactically encoded evidentiality. The results suggest that children align with adults in mapping source of evidence to sentence type during fourth grade, when they are 9 years old or older, suggesting that there should be additional factors behind the delayed comprehension of evidentiality. It is argued that these factors are mainly grammatical, and, most importantly, they arise to a larger extent in languages that encode evidentiality in the syntax

摘要

最近关于获得证据的研究，无论是形态学还是句法编码，都认为检测到的理解滞后是由于与他人的权威或心理观点有关的因素，其中“其他人”代表参与的其他人以各种方式进行实验（例如，实验者或道具中的某人）。然而，这些研究还没有检测到儿童最终与成人在理解语法结构编码证据解释时在句法编码时保持一致的年龄。本文报道的理解力研究考虑了上述因素，涉及大量二至五年级的讲希腊语的儿童，以及一个成人对照组，调查句法编码的证据性。结果表明，儿童在四年级（即 9 岁或以上）将证据来源映射到句子类型时与成人保持一致，这表明延迟理解证据的背后应该还有其他因素。有人认为，这些因素主要是语法方面的，而且最重要的是，它们在更大程度上出现在语法中编码证据性的语言中