Evidentials and Source Knowledge in Turkish

Recent research has indicated that conceptual development in a specific domain may not be independent of the way it is mapped linguistically. We explore this claim in the semantic domain of evidentiality by considering various sets of data from Turkish-speaking children between one and a half to six years. We present evidence for (1) the appropriate use of grammaticalized markers of direct experience, inference, and linguistic report by age three, (2) the understanding of knowledge source ("theory of knowledge") around age four, (3) the understanding of linguistic form and knowledge source relationship ("theory of evidentiality") by age six, and (4) a predictive relationship between the use of the reported speech marker and memory for knowledge source around age four. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)