Info for readers
Info for authors
Info for editors
Info for libraries
Order form
Shopping cart
Liane Jeschull and Tom Roeper
107-115 (complete pdf)
This study investigates whether English-speaking children differentiate the evidential marker 'looks like' and the certainty marker 'probably.' An analysis of naturalistic data suggests that 3- to 5-year olds indeed produce and discriminate the two expressions. A controlled comprehension experiment tested whether children also correctly understand their semantics. The experiment used contexts in which 'looks like' and 'probably' would lead to opposite answers, where visual evidence suggests something that is impossible. While adults clearly understand 'looks like' evidentially and 'probably' as a certainty marker, 4- and 5-year old children likewise prefer 'probably' as a certainty marker, yet allow 'looks like' as a marker of both evidentiality and certainty. These data support the claim that sentences with evidential markers carry a pragmatic inference about the speaker's degree of certainty, but never the reverse (Davis, Potts, and Speas 2007).
Published in:
Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA 2008)
edited by Jean Crawford, Koichi Otaki, and Masahiko Takahashi
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-436-2 library binding
v+346 pages
publication date: 2009
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA