Does firsthand vs. non-firsthand evidential framing affect a narrative’s construal?

The present research explored whether evidentiality, the linguistic signaling of the source of a claim (firsthand vs. non-firsthand), can exert a framing effect on a narrative. Two narratives were constructed that described a character who was thought to engage in some illegal behavior, which was presented in the narratives as a firsthand evidential claim or non-firsthand. Upon reading each narrative, participants were to answer a series of questions to probe their mental-model of the narrative. Participants were native speakers of English that marks evidentiality at the lexical level or Turkish that marks evidentiality as suffixes. We hypothesized an “evidentiality effect” whereby firsthand vs. non-firsthand evidential marking of a key claim in a narrative would differentially affect construal of the narrative. Support for this effect was obtained across both narratives, with the effect being more robust in English than in Turkish, possibly due to the greater perceptual salience of evidential marking in English.