When the owner of information is unsure:Epistemic uncertainty influences evidentiality processing in Turkish

This study deals with the extent to which epistemic uncertainty influences processing of grammatical evidentiality – the linguistic reference to information source – in Turkish native speakers. Across a series of sentence reading experiments administered to groups of Turkish adult native speakers, this study showed that indirect evidentiality in firsthand witnessing contexts evoked greater post-interpretive disruptions (Experiment 1), and were found largely unfavourable (Experiment 2), suggesting that in Turkish, speaking about one's own information with indirect evidentiality leads to an inherent effect. Furthermore, a first-person's witnessed information marked with direct evidentiality is found to be rather unacceptable or unsettling under low epistemic certainty conditions, where the speaker is unsure of his/her own witnessing (Experiment 3), whilst a non-first-person's information blends well with uncertainty constraints for which, Turkish readers strongly favour the assumption marker (Experiment 4). This study indicates that Turkish speakers’ sensitivity to uses of evidentiality is influenced by the ‘uncertainty of information owner’. There is a semantic overlap and a complex interface between evidentiality and epistemic modality in Turkish, and this interface is mediated by the ownership of information (first-person versus non-first-person) and the owner's uncertainty about his/her information. Further implications are discussed

Electrophysiological differences in older and younger adults’ anaphoric but not cataphoric pronoun processing in the absence of age-related behavioural slowdown

This study reports on an event-related potentials experiment to uncover whether per-millisecond electrophysiological brain activity and analogous behavioural responses are age-sensitive when comprehending anaphoric (referent-first) and cataphoric (pronoun-first) pronouns. Two groups of French speakers were recruited (young n = 18; aged 19–35 and older adults n = 15; aged 57–88) to read sentences where the anaphoric/cataphoric pronouns and their potential referents either matched or mismatched in gender. Our findings indicate that (1) the older adults were not less accurate or slower in their behavioural responses to the mismatches than the younger adults, (2) both anaphoric and cataphoric conditions evoked a central/parietally distributed P600 component with similar timing and amplitude in both the groups. Importantly, mean amplitudes of the P600 effect were modulated by verbal short-term memory span in the older adults but not in the younger adults, (3) nevertheless, the older but not the younger adults displayed an additional anterior negativity emerging on the frontal regions in response to the anaphoric mismatches. These results suggest that pronoun processing is resilient in healthy ageing individuals, but that functional recruitment of additional brain regions, evidenced with the anterior negativity, compensates for increased processing demands in the older adults’ anaphora processing

Fosfonat grubu içeren bazı aminopirazol bileşiklerinin sentezi ve karakterizasyonu

06.03.2018 tarihli ve 30352 sayılı Resmi Gazetede yayımlanan “Yükseköğretim Kanunu İle Bazı Kanun Ve Kanun Hükmünde Kararnamelerde Değişiklik Yapılması Hakkında Kanun” ile 18.06.2018 tarihli “Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” gereğince tam metin erişime açılmıştır.Pirazol türevleri doğada nadir olarak bulunan sentetik kökenli heterosiklik bileşiklerdir. Çeşitli biyolojik aktiviteleri bu bileşiklerin sentezini önemli hale getirmiştir. Önemli pirazol türevlerinden biri de aminopirazol bileşikleridir. Öte yandan organofosfor bileşiklerinin önemli bir sınıfını temsil eden fosfonat ve fosfonik asit türevleri de biyolojik aktivite potansiyeli nedeniyle hem tıbbi hem de zirai olarak geniş bir uygulama alanına sahiptir. Bu çalışmada başlangıç bileşiği olarak ilerleyen basamaklarda yapılan paladyum katalizli çapraz kenetlenme reaksiyonları için 4-bromofenilasetonitril bileşiği kullanıldı. Bu bileşik çeşitli etil esterleri ile reaksiyona sokularak 1,3-ketonitril (BS-1) türevleri elde edildi. Bu bileşiklerin hidrazin türevleriyle reaksiyona sokulmasıyla brom içeren 5-aminopirazol türevleri (BS-2) elde edildi. Bu basamaktan sonra iki farklı sentez yolu izlendi. Öncelikle elde edilen bazı aminopirazol türevleri Suzuki-Miyaura reaksiyonu ile aldehit grubu içeren türevlerine (BS-3) dönüştürüldü. Daha sonra Pudovik reaksiyonuyla -hidroksifosfonat (BS-5) ve Kabachnik-Fields reaksiyonuyla -aminofosfonat (BS-6) bileşikleri elde edildi. Ayrıca, brom içeren aminopirazol türevleri Hirao reaksiyonuyla arilfosfonat (BS-4) türevlerine dönüştürüldü. Elde edilen tüm fosfonat bileşiklerinin hidroliz edilmesiyle fosfonik asit (BS-7, BS-8, BS-9) türevleri elde edildi. Sonuç olarak, biyolojik aktivite göstermesi beklenen aminopirazol ve fosfonat gruplarını ihtiva eden bazı heterosiklik bileşikler ilk kez sentezlendi. Sentezlenen bileşiklerin 1H NMR, 13C NMR, 19F NMR, 31P NMR spektrumları, seçilen bazı bileşiklerin ise, IR ve X-ışını kırınımı spektrumları alınarak yapıları doğrulandı.Pyrazole derivatives are heterocyclic compounds having synthetic origin and found rarely in the nature. Various biological activities has made it significant of synthesis of these compounds. One of the important pyrazole derivatives are amino pyrazole compounds. On the other hand phosphonate and phosphonic acid derivatives, an important class of compounds representing the organophosphour has a wide range of applications in both medical and agricultural areas because of their potential biological activities. In this study, 4-bromophenyl acetonitrile was used as the starting compound for palladium catalysed cross coupling reactions carried out in the subsequent steps. 1,3-ketonitrile derivatives (BS-1) were obtained via reacting the starting compounds with various ethylesters. These compounds were reacted with some hydrazine derivatives to obtain 5-amino pyrazoles (BS-2). After these steps, two different synthetic routes were followed. Firstly, some of the amino pyrazoles were converted to compounds carrying an aldehyde functional group (BS-3) by Suzuki-Miyaura reaction and then to α–hydroxyphosphonate compounds (BS-5) by Pudovik reaction and α–aminophosphonate compounds (BS-6) by Kabachnik-Fields reaction. Bromine containing amino pyrazoles are also converted to arylphosphonate derivatives (BS-4) by Hirao reaction. At the end, phosphonic acid derivatives (BS-7, BS-8, BS-9) were obtained by hydrolizing all of the phosphonate compounds already synthesized. In conclusion, some heterocyclic compounds having biological activity potential by virtue of containing both amino pyrazole and phosphonic acid were synthesized for the first time. Structures of all the synthesized compounds were verified by 1H NMR, 13C NMR, 19F NMR, 31P NMR spectrums and structures of some selected compounds by IR and X-ray diffraction spectrums additionally

Pre-verbal focus in Turkish: An eye-tracking during reading study

International audienc

Pronoun processing in post-stroke aphasia:A meta-analytic review of individual data

Pronouns constitute a heterogeneous class of linguistic elements, allowing for expression of referential relationships. Pronouns have an important place in daily communication which speakers and listeners rely heavily on for. Aphasia literature has evidenced that pronoun processing is impaired in people with aphasia (PWA), although explanations underpinning pronoun impairments are mixed. To address this, through a systematic literature review, we identified 42 studies which examined pronoun processing (both production and comprehension) in 474 PWA across 16 different languages. An initial meta-analysis was conducted on the overall data with all PWA and pronoun conditions with an outcome measure indicating whether or not pronoun processing is individually impaired in PWA. Further meta-analytic models were built to compare certain conditions of particular interest (e.g. reflexives vs object pronouns, object vs subject wh-pronouns) in an attempt to further disentangle the explanations behind their difficulty in use. Outputs from our meta-analysis suggest that: (i) a form of pronoun impairment is consistently present in aphasia regardless of aphasia type, fluency or language spoken; (ii) pronoun variables show selectivity in their impairment, for instance, reflexives are better preserved over object pronouns, and the subject-advantage in who-pronouns is language-selective; and (iii) other important linguistic variables that largely predict pronoun impairments include aspects like argument position of subject/object phrases, case marking, cliticization, and the presence of relative clause constructions. These outputs are discussed in relation to neurolinguistic hypotheses that predict pronoun impairments in aphasia

Does a walk-through video help the parser down the garden-path? A visually enhanced self-paced reading study in Dutch

The human language processing mechanism assigns a structure to the incoming materials as they unfold. There is evidence that the parser prefers some attachment types over others; however, theories of sentence processing are still in dispute over the stage at which each source of information contributes to the parsing system. The present study aims to identify the nature of initial parsing decisions during sentence processing through manipulating attachment type and verbs’ argument structure. To this end, we designed a self-paced reading task using globally ambiguous constructions in Dutch. The structures included double locative prepositional phrases (PPs) where the first PP could attach both to the verb (high attachment) and the noun preceding it (low attachment). To disambiguate the structures, we presented a visual context in the form of short animation clips prior to each reading task. Furthermore, we manipulated the argument structure of the sentences using 2- and 3-argument verbs. The results showed that parsing decisions were influenced by contextual cues depending on the argument structure of the verb. That is, the visual context overcame the preference for high attachment only in the case of 2-argument verbs, while this preference persisted in structures including 3-argument verbs as represented by longer reading times for the low attachment interpretations. These findings can be taken as evidence that our language processing system actively integrates information from linguistic and non-linguistic sources from the initial stages of analysis to build up meaning. We discuss our findings in light of serial and parallel models of sentence processing