Children’s Understanding of Source Reliability and Knowledge Generalizability from Grammatical Cues: Evidence from Turkish

This study investigates Turkish-speaking children’s reliability attributions to linguistic indicators of evidential source and whether source reliability has an effect on knowledge generalizability. Ninety-six four- and six-year-olds were first asked to perform a reliability judgement task where informants used the indirect evidential marker -mIş in the contexts of inference and hearsay. Next, they were randomly assigned to three groups and introduced a novel object “blicket” declared to be magnetic, using inference, hearsay, and generic statements, and their generalization behaviours were measured. Results showed that both four- and six-year-olds attributed higher reliability to inference compared to hearsay as evidential source, and six-year-olds did so more than four-year-olds. Four-year-olds generalized more in response to generic statements than inferential or hearsay statements, whereas six-year-olds generalized similarly in all conditions. Although children attributed more reliability to inference than hearsay, they did not generalize inferential statements more than hearsay statements.