Evidential Categories in Language and Cognition

人类通常会对其信仰的起源进行推理，例如，他们是否通过直接感知、交流或推理发现了某事。语言在对信息源进行编码时所使用的方法各不相同。有些语言使用词汇手段(例如，“我听说/想出John去听音乐会了”)，而另一些语言则使用语法标记。在国家科学基金会的支持下，帕帕夫拉古博士将研究学习不同语言的儿童如何获得可证性，信息源的语言编码，以及可证性的获得如何与关于信息来源和可靠性的非语言推理有关。该研究项目的另一个目标是调查证据编码方式的跨语言差异是否会影响信息源的非语言表征。通过比较不同语言使用者和不同儿童和成人群体在语言和非语言任务上的表现，这项研究可以揭示信息源在语言中编码的方式是否影响非语言思维。这项研究的一个独特之处在于，在同一领域内对语言知识和非语言知识的各个方面进行了创新和系统的比较。早期职业研究人员将接受跨学科研究方面的培训，包括国际数据收集。

Humans routinely reason about the origin of their beliefs, for example, whether they found out about something through direct perception, communication or inference. Languages vary in the means they use to encode information sources. Some languages use lexical means (e.g., "I heard/figured out that John went to the concert") while other languages use grammatical markers. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Papafragou will examine how children learning different languages acquire evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of information sources, and how the acquisition of evidentiality relates to non-linguistic reasoning about the origins and reliability of information. Another goal of the research project is to investigate whether cross-linguistic differences in the way evidentiality is encoded influence the non-linguistic representation of information sources. By comparing performance on linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks by speakers of different languages and across various child and adult groups, this research could reveal whether the way information sources are encoded in language affects nonlinguistic thinking. A unique feature of this research lies in the innovative and systematic comparison between aspects of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge within a single domain. Early career researchers will get training in interdisciplinary research, including international data collection.