It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent
distinctions are easier to learn (Typological Prevalence
Hypothesis - TPH). Prior work supports this hypothesis in
phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed
semantics. Using an Artificial Language Learning paradigm,
we explore the learnability of semantic distinctions within the
domain of evidentiality (i.e. the linguistic encoding of
information sources). Our results support the TPH, since the
most prevalent evidential system was learned best while the
most rare evidentiality system yielded the worst learnability
results. Furthermore, our results indicate that, cross-
linguistically, indirect information sources seem to be marked
preferentially (and acquired more easily) compared to direct
sources. We explain this pattern in terms of the pragmatic need
to mark indirect, potentially more unreliable sources over
direct sources of information.