Children’s Comprehension of Evidentiality Through Intonation in Majorcan Catalan

Abstract

This paper investigates the developmental trajectory for children’s comprehension of evidential marking of directly perceived evidence through intonation in Majorcan Catalan (MC). Additionally, we aimed to explore children’s general source monitoring abilities and their capacity to make inferences based on directly perceived information. Given that evidential comprehension tends to develop relatively late when marked morphosyntactically, we hypothesized that detecting evidential meaning through intonation would also emerge later than other types of intonational comprehension. We thus included a task to assess children’s ability to distinguish between assertions and polar questions based on intonation. Data were collected through 4 tasks with a total of 97 MC-speaking children between first Preschool and second Primary school grades, along with 12 adults as a control group. Our results support the idea that source monitoring abilities develop independently from the linguistic abilities under investigation, whereas the ability to make inferences is still developing during the critical window for acquiring the distinction between assertions and polar questions, as well as for detecting intonational evidentiality. Furthermore, children succeeded in distinguishing between assertions and polar questions based on intonation well before they began performing above chance on the intonational evidentiality task, which started around age 7. This suggests that the developmental trajectory for comprehending intonational meaning depends on the specific meaning encoded by the intonational pattern.