Learning to use demonstratives in conversation: What do language specific strategies in Turkish reveal?

Pragmatic development requires the ability to use linguistic forms, along with non-verbal cues, to focus an interlocutor's attention on a referent during conversation. We investigate the development of this ability by examining how the use of demonstratives is learned in Turkish, where a three-way demonstrative system (bu, su, o) obligatorily encodes both distance contrasts (i.e. proximal and distal) and absence or presence of the addressee's visual attention on the referent. A comparison of the demonstrative use by Turkish children (6 four- and 6 six-year-olds) and 6 adults during conversation shows that adultlike use of attention directing demonstrative, su, is not mastered even at the age of six, while the distance contrasts are learned earlier. This language specific development reveals that designing referential forms in consideration of recipient's attentional status during conversation is a pragmatic feat that takes more than six years to develop

Early produced signs are iconic. Evidence from Turkish Sign Language

Contains fulltext : 175395.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)The 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017), 26 juli 201

Early language-specificity in Turkish children's caused motion event expressions in speech and gesture

Contains fulltext : 317558.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Putting interaction back into child language: Examples from Turkish

As in the case of other non-English languages, the study of the acquisition of Turkish has mostly focused on aspects of grammatical morphology and syntax, largely neglecting the study of the effect of interactional factors on child morphosyntax. This paper reviews indications from past research that studying input and adult-child discourse can facilitate the study of the acquisition of morphosyntax in the Turkish language. It also provides some recent studies of Turkish child language on the relationship of child-directed speech to the early acquisition of morphosyntax, and on the pragmatic features of a certain kind of discourse form in child-directed speech called variation sets

Linguistic representations of emotion terms: Within- culture variation with respect to education and self-construals

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.The present study examines the linguistic representations of emotion terms in relation to educational attainment and self-construal through a two-part narration task. Eighty Turkish adults recounted four events that they experienced in the last five years of their lives (event-description task) and then described what they felt during these events (emotion-elicited narration task). The results show that higher levels of educational attainment and autonomous-related self-construal predicted higher levels of linguistic abstractness in emotion terms, whereas higher levels of related self-construal predicted lower levels of linguistic abstractness in emotion terms. Comparisons of the level of abstractness of emotion terms in event-descriptions and emotion-elicited narrations indicate that while the linguistic abstractness of emotion terms was similar across the two tasks in the lower-educated group, it increased in the emotion-elicited narration task in the higher-educated group. The role of formal education and self-construal in emotional language use were discussed as sources of within-culture variation