Evidentiality and trust: The effect of informational goals

Abstract

Children's ability to exercise selective trust is crucial for the development of their knowledge and successful socialization. For speakers of some languages, evidentials, which are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers, could provide valuable support of these processes. Focusing on Bulgarian, this chapter situates children's use of evidentials in reliability judgments within the broader context of research on decision making and foregrounds the role of informational goals in children's decisions.