{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028400597907324365, 'fraction_numerical': 0.015944195316392625, 'mean_word_length': 5.605263157894737, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Evidential Morphology and Theory of Mind

The perennial fascination with the relationship between language and thought has generated much research across various disciplines. In recent years, commentators have called for closer examination of the connection between language acquisition and conceptual development (Bowerman & Levinson, 2001). Rather than assuming that language development always presupposes cognitive development, several researchers have started considering whether language learning could transform conceptual structure by making certain concepts available to the learner (e.g., de Villiers & Pyers, 1997; Gopnik & Choi, 1995; Bowerman, 1996). It has been suggested that linguistic categories might reasonably have cognitive consequences in domains far removed from perception, involving higher-level cognitive processing, where human cognitive representations appear to differ from those of other animals (Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001; Spelke & Tsivkin, 2001). The ability to attribute mental representations to oneself and to others, widely referred to as theory of mind, has been considered by many a promising arena for exploration of such effects (Carruthers, 1996; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1997). In this paper, we focus on one aspect of language and its potential effect on theory of mind development. Specifically, we examine the developmental relationship between children’s ability to reason about evidence for their own beliefs and the beliefs of others and the acquisition of evidential vocabulary. Human beings routinely make use of a variety of evidential sources in acquiring beliefs about the world (these sources include, e.g., direct perception, communication and inference). Humans also possess the ability to understand the connection between evidence and consequent effects on knowledge states. This ability is useful in tracking the pieces of evidence that led to the formation of a belief, assessing the reliability of a belief, and ultimately arriving at a set of