The impact of Europeanisation on policy-making in Turkey: controversies, uncertainties and misfits in broadcasting policy, 1999-2005

The recognition of Turkey’s candidacy for European Union (EU) membership at Helsinki European Council Summit in December 1999 marked a profound shift in EU-Turkey relations, which has been difficult and turbulent for decades. Turkey started undergoing a drastic transformation after the Helsinki Summit and was successful in clinching a date from the EU in October 2004 to launch accession talks. In between these two dates the two consecutive governments issued a series of new legislations in order to comply with EU conditionality, particularly with political criteria also known as the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ and finally started membership negotiations in October 2005. This study aims to investigate and analyse the impact of the EU on policy-making processes in Turkey between 1999 and 2005 by focusing on a specific policy area: broadcasting. At the simplest level, it is motivated by an academic interest in the complexity of Turkey’s everlasting association with Europe and seeks to explore the dynamics of the post-Helsinki candidacy process by employing various theoretical tools offered by research on Europeanisation. Thus, although it questions the whole rationale of the pre-accession process in Turkey, it looks into the domestic arena of broadcasting policy-making to explore how ‘EU accession conditionality’ is translated into domestic policy responses. It concludes that Turkey’s response to EU conditionality was not unified across different issues of broadcasting policy. Its response to ‘democratic conditionality’ was directly influenced by prevailing ideas about ‘the credibility of the EU’ as well as calculations of the ‘costs of compliance’, and its response to ‘acquis conditionality’ resulted in a regulatory chaos. Overall, this research reveals that where broadcasting policy-making is concerned, changes as a result of the EU’s impact on Turkey were limited. Rather than transformation, the outcome of this process was a minimal degree of adaptation

Language Use in Deaf Children with Early-signing versus Late-signing Deaf Parents

Contains fulltext : 246462.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)Previous research has shown that spatial language is sensitive to the effects of delayed language exposure. Locative encodings of late-signing deaf adults varied from those of early-signing deaf adults in the preferred types of linguistic forms. In the current study, we investigated whether such differences would be found in spatial language use of deaf children with deaf parents who are either early or late signers of Turkish Sign Language (TİD). We analyzed locative encodings elicited from these two groups of deaf children for the use of different linguistic forms and the types of classifier handshapes. Our findings revealed differences between these two groups of deaf children in their preferred types of linguistic forms, which showed parallels to differences between late versus early deaf adult signers as reported by earlier studies. Deaf children in the current study, however, were similar to each other in the type of classifier handshapes that they used in their classifier constructions. Our findings have implications for expanding current knowledge on to what extent variation in language input (i.e., from early vs. late deaf signers) is reflected in children’s productions as well as the role of linguistic input on language development in general.14 p

Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals

Genomic analyses of Neanderthals have previously provided insights into their population history and relationship to modern humans1–8, but the social organization of Neanderthal communities remains poorly understood. Here we present genetic data for 13 Neanderthals from two Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia: 11 from Chagyrskaya Cave9,10 and 2 from Okladnikov Cave11—making this one of the largest genetic studies of a Neanderthal population to date. We used hybridization capture to obtain genome-wide nuclear data, as well as mitochondrial and Y-chromosome sequences. Some Chagyrskaya individuals were closely related, including a father–daughter pair and a pair of second-degree relatives, indicating that at least some of the individuals lived at the same time. Up to one-third of these individuals’ genomes had long segments of homozygosity, suggesting that the Chagyrskaya Neanderthals were part of a small community. In addition, the Y-chromosome diversity is an order of magnitude lower than the mitochondrial diversity, a pattern that we found is best explained by female migration between communities. Thus, the genetic data presented here provide a detailed documentation of the social organization of an isolated Neanderthal community at the easternmost extent of their known range