This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by the Centre for Psychological Approaches for Studying Education (PASE)

Speaker: Dr Birsu Kandemirci, Lecturer in Psychology, Kingston University London

Language has a crucial role in demonstrating and facilitating children’s socio-cognitive skills. Some languages provide support for keeping track of one’s knowledge or even force the speaker to mention the source of their knowledge (e.g., Aikhenvald, 2015). Turkish is one of these languages that distinctly marks the source of the speakers’ knowledge by obliging them to specify their source when talking about past events by the help of evidential markers (Aksu-Koç et al., 2009). English, on the other hand, does not enforce such an obligation on the speakers, and the linguistic specification of the source of information is optional. Learning a language with obligatory evidential markers can have an impact on children’s socio-cognitive development. For example, Turkish 3- to 4-year-olds were suggested to be at an advantage in terms of their false-belief understanding compared to their English- and Chinese-speaking peers (Lucas et al., 2013). The aim of the current study was to investigate the contribution of evidentiality proficiency to children’s false-belief understanding and source monitoring abilities. We compared Turkish-speaking (N = 50, Mage = 50.1 months) and English-speaking (N = 50, Mage = 50.6 months) children’s performance in three false-belief tasks. As factors that might impact children’s performance, we measured their source monitoring ability (Gopnik & Graf, 1988), evidentiality competency (Ögel, 2007; Aksu-Koç et al., 2009), receptive vocabulary, short-term memory, and demographic factors, looking at their gender and age.

For Turkish-speaking children, their use of direct evidentiality predicted their source monitoring skills, which, in turn predicted their false-belief understanding. For English-speaking children, false-belief understanding was not related to source monitoring. The combined results from Turkish- and English-speaking children demonstrated that Turkish-speaking children had better false-belief understanding performance, and only for Turkish-speaking children, source monitoring skills predicted false-belief understanding. Therefore, an indirect impact of evidentiality on false-belief understanding by means of source monitoring can be suggested for Turkish-speaking children. In this seminar, I will discuss how these results can be interpreted, and to what extent a comparison of two languages with different grammatical structures might be informative.

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