The first goal of this study is to test the prediction that children who perceive similarity between a novel physical event and the real world will be more likely to express belief in the reality of a novel character involved in the event than children who do not perceive such similarity. The second goal is to test the effects of familiarity on similarity judgements, reality status beliefs, and their association. In this study, children ages 4 and 6 years were visited 5 times and were repeatedly told about a novel character performing either a highly similar, moderately dissimilar, or a highly dissimilar physical event. Their similarity judgements and reality status judgements were solicited on days 1 and 5. Results revealed high rates of association between similarity and reality status beliefs for the highly similar and moderately dissimilar events but low levels of association for the highly dissimilar event on day 1. With repeated exposure, children’s positive similarity judgements increased for the highly dissimilar event leading to higher rates of association. / text

Children use many cues to differentiate reality from fantasy, including context, testimony from others, and physical evidence in the world around them. However, due to individual differences, some children hold strong reality status biases that interfere with their ability to infer reality status from these cues correctly. This research identified two general cognitive skills, inhibitory control and a metacognitive understanding of certainty, which serve as mechanisms for overcoming biases to infer reality status. In general, children with a high interest in fantastical play and older children with poorer developed inhibitory control skills are more likely to display a reality status bias. Additionally, children with reality status biases are more likely to overcome them to infer reality status correctly when they have a better metacognitive understanding of certainty and better developed inhibitory control. This research informs both the fantasy/reality literature and the scientific reasoning literature in demonstrating how biases can affect children's judgments. / text

Iquito, a highly endangered Zaparoan language of the Peruvian Amazon, exhibits a typologically unusual word order alternation that marks the grammatical category of reality status (i.e. the distinction between realized (realis) and unrealized or hypothetical (irrealis) events). This alternation is the only reliable marker of the category; Iquito does not employ morphology to mark the realis/irrealis distinction. While the word order of Iquito realis constructions is reliably SVO, the word order of irrealis constructions does not fall into one of the canonical orders. It is characterized by an element (X) intervening between the subject and the verb, resulting in the order SXV. In this dissertation, I provide a detailed description and analysis of the realis/irrealis word order alternation. Using data from both elicitation and texts that I collected while in the field, I describe the types of elements that occur in the preverbal position of the irrealis construction, determine what unifies these elements, and establish which element of the sentence will occur in this position and what conditions this choice. Relying on the available data for the other languages in the family, I examine the expression of reality status in these languages and discuss how reality status comes to be associated with word order. I also provide a survey of other languages exhibiting similar word order alternations and discuss how they compare to the alternation we see in Iquito, concluding that Iquito is an example of an “ideal” word order alternation because word order is the sole indicator of the grammatical category with which it is associated. / text