Linguistic representation of emotion terms: Variation with respect to self-construal and education

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 lowereducated 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

Relation of infants' and mothers' pointing to infants' vocabulary measured directly and with parental reports.

Infants' and parents' pointing gestures predict infants' concurrent and prospective language development. Most studies have measured vocabulary size using parental reports. However, parents tend to underestimate or overestimate infants' vocabulary necessitating the use of direct measures alongside parent reports. The present study examined whether mothers' index-finger pointing, and infants' whole-hand and index-finger pointing at 14 months associate with infants' receptive and expressive vocabulary based on parental reports and directly measured lexical processing efficiency (LPE) concurrently at 14 months and prospectively at 18 months. We used the decorated room paradigm to measure pointing frequency, the Turkish communicative development inventory I to measure infants' receptive vocabulary, Turkish communicative development inventory II to measure their expressive vocabulary, and the Looking-While-Listening (LWL) task to measure LPE. At 14 months, 34 mother-infant dyads, and at 18 months, 30 dyads were included in the analyses. We found that only infants' index-finger pointing frequency at 14 months predicted their LPE (both reaction time and accuracy) prospectively at 18 months but not concurrently at 14 months. Neither maternal pointing nor infants' pointing predicted their receptive and expressive vocabulary based on indirect measurement. The results extend the evidence on the relation between index-finger pointing and language development to a more direct measure of vocabulary

Do typological differences in the expression of causality influence preschool children’s causal event construal?

This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in causal expressions influence the mapping of causal language on causal events in three- to four-year-old Swiss-German learners and Turkish learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed syntactically with lexical causatives (e.g., ässe ‘to eat’ vs. füettere ‘to feed’). In Turkish, causality is expressed both syntactically and morphologically – with a verbal suffix (e.g., yemek ‘to eat’ vs. yeDIRmek ‘to feed’). Moreover, unlike Swiss-German, Turkish allows argument ellipsis (e.g., ‘The mother feeds [∅]’). Here, we used pseudo-verbs to test whether and how well Swiss-German-learning children inferred a causal meaning from lexical causatives compared to Turkish-learning children tested in three conditions: lexical causatives, morphological causatives, and morphological causatives with object ellipsis. Swiss-German-learning children and Turkish-learning children in all three conditions reliably inferred causal meanings, and did so to a similar extent. The findings suggest that, as young as age 3, children learning two different languages similarly make use of language-specific causality cues (syntactic and morphological alike) to infer causal meanings

Grammatical development in both languages of bilingual Turkish-Dutch children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

Introduction: To guarantee a reliable diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in bilingual children, evaluating both languages is recommended. However, little is known about how DLD impacts the heritage language, and it is largely unknown whether bilingual children with DLD develop the heritage language at the same pace as their peers with typical development (TD). Methods: For this longitudinal study that focused on children's grammatical development, we analyzed semi-spontaneous speech samples of 10 Turkish-Dutch children with DLD (bi-DLD) and 10 Turkish-Dutch children with typical development (bi-TD). Children were 5 or 6 years old at the first wave of data collection, and there were three waves of longitudinal data collection with 1-year intervals. In addition, data from 20 monolingual Dutch controls were analyzed (10 mono-DLD, 10 mono-TD). Results and discussion: Results indicate that heritage language assessment can inform clinical diagnosis. In the case of Turkish spoken in the Netherlands, short sentences, the absence of the genitive suffix in simple constructions and avoidance of complex constructions that require possessive marking could potentially be clinical markers of DLD. Accusative case errors are also relatively frequent in bilingual Turkish-Dutch children with DLD, but these are less promising as a clinical marker because previous research suggests that omission and substitution of accusative case can be part of the input to Turkish heritage language learners. In Dutch, frequent omission of grammatical morphemes in the verbal domain coupled with a limited amount of overregularization errors could indicate that a child is at risk for DLD, both in bilingual and monolingual contexts. Cross-linguistic comparisons of error types in Turkish and Dutch confirm that, regardless of typological differences, children with DLD use short sentences, avoid complex structures, and omit grammatical morphemes. Longitudinal analyses revealed that children with DLD can develop the heritage language at the same pace as TD children, even if this language is not supported at school. Strong intergenerational transmission and heritage language maintenance among Turkish migrants in the Netherlands may be key

Correlates of infant pointing frequency in the first year.

This study examines the emergence of concurrent correlates of infant pointing frequency with the aim of contributing to its ontogenetic theories. We measured monthly from 8 to 12 months infants' (N = 56) index-finger pointing frequency along with several candidate correlates: (1) family socioeconomic status (SES), (2) mothers' pointing production, and (3) infants' point following to targets in front of and behind them. Results revealed that (1) infants increased their pointing frequency across age, but high-SES infants had a steeper increase, and a higher pointing frequency than low-SES infants from 10 months onward, (2) maternal pointing frequency was not associated with infant pointing frequency at any age, (3) infants' point following abilities to targets behind their visual fields was positively associated with their pointing frequency at 12 months, after pointing had already emerged around 10 months. Findings suggest that family SES impacts infants' pointing development more generally, not just through maternal pointing. The association between pointing and following points to targets behind, but not in front, suggests that a higher level of referential understanding emerges after, and perhaps through the production of pointing

The benefits of being bilingual: Working memory in bilingual Turkish–Dutch children

AbstractWhether bilingual children outperform monolingual children on visuospatial and verbal working memory tests was investigated. In addition, relations among bilingual proficiency, language use at home, and working memory were explored. The bilingual Turkish–Dutch children (n=68) in this study were raised in families with lower socioeconomic status (SES) and had smaller Dutch vocabularies than Dutch monolingual controls (n=52). Having these characteristics, they are part of an under-researched bilingual population. It was found that the bilingual Turkish–Dutch children showed cognitive gains in visuospatial and verbal working memory tests when SES and vocabulary were controlled, in particular on tests that require processing and not merely storage. These findings converge with recent studies that have revealed bilingual cognitive advantages beyond inhibition, and they support the hypothesis that experience with dual language management influences the central executive control system that regulates processing across a wide range of task demands. Furthermore, the results show that bilingual cognitive advantages are found in socioeconomically disadvantaged bilingual populations and suggest that benefits to executive control are moderated by bilingual proficiency

Verbs or Nouns? A cross-linguistic study examining the effect of morphological complexity and input on children's early lexical development

Despite considerable differences in the structures of the world's languages and child-rearing practices, children show remarkable cross-linguistic similarities in their early lexical development, including a preference for nouns. Here, we analyze children's early lexical production in naturalistic longitudinal corpora in a large-scale cross-linguistic comparison of 10 typologically highly diverse languages. We assess morphological complexity as a possible explanatory variable for children's higher noun-to-verb ratios and evaluate whether children's gradual increase in morphological productivity is correlated with their gradual decrease in noun-to-verb ratios towards the level found in their ambient language. We show that in languages with complex verb morphology, children exhibit a higher deviation in their noun-to-verb ratio compared to adults. This deviation gradually diminishes as they become more productive in the use of their target language. This effect holds across languages, despite their differences in morphological complexity

Influence of causal language on causal understanding: A comparison between Swiss German and Turkish

Young children have difficulties in understanding untypical causal relations. Although we know that hearing a causal description facilitates this understanding, less is known about what particular features of causal language are responsible for this facilitation. Here, we asked two questions. First, do syntactic and morphological cues in the grammatical structure of sentences facilitate the extraction of causal meaning? Second, do these different cues influence this facilitation to different degrees? We studied children learning either Swiss German or Turkish, two languages that differ in their expression of causality. Swiss German predominantly uses lexical causatives (e.g., schniidä [cut]), which lack a formal marker to denote causality. Turkish, alongside lexical causatives, uses morphological causatives, which formally mark causation (e.g., ye [eat] vs. yeDIr [feed]). We tested 2.5- to 3.5-year-old children’s understanding of untypical cause–effect relations described with either noncausal language (e.g., Here is a cube and a car) or causal language using a pseudo-verb (e.g., lexical: The cube gorps the car). We tested 135 Turkish-learning children (noncausal, lexical, and morphological conditions) and 90 Swiss-German-learning children (noncausal and lexical conditions). Children in both language groups performed better in the causal language condition(s) than in the noncausal language condition. Furthermore, Turkish-learning children’s performance in both the lexical and morphological conditions was similar to that of Swiss-German-learning children in the lexical condition and did not differ from each other. These findings suggest that the structural cues of causal language support children’s understanding of untypical causal relations regardless of the type of construction

Usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition

It was long considered to be impossible to learn grammar based on linguistic experience alone. In the past decade, however, advances in usage-based linguistic theory, computational linguistics, and developmental psychology changed the view on this matter. So-called usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition state that language can be learned from language use itself, by means of social skills like joint attention, and by means of powerful generalization mechanisms. This paper first summarizes the assumptions regarding the nature of linguistic representations and processing. Usage-based theories are nonmodular and nonreductionist, i.e., they emphasize the form-function relationships, and deal with all of language, not just selected levels of representations. Furthermore, storage and processing is considered to be analytic as well as holistic, such that there is a continuum between children's unanalyzed chunks and abstract units found in adult language. In the second part, the empirical evidence is reviewed. Children's linguistic competence is shown to be limited initially, and it is demonstrated how children can generalize knowledge based on direct and indirect positive evidence. It is argued that with these general learning mechanisms, the usage-based paradigm can be extended to multilingual language situations and to language acquisition under special circumstances

Space-pitch associations differ in their susceptibility to language

To what extent are links between musical pitch and space universal, and to what extent are they shaped by language? There is contradictory evidence in support of both universality and linguistic relativity presently, leaving the question open. To address this, speakers of Dutch who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height and speakers of Turkish who use a thickness metaphor were tested in simple nonlinguistic space-pitch association tasks. Both groups showed evidence of a thickness-pitch association, but differed significantly in their height-pitch associations, suggesting the latter may be more susceptible to language. When participants had to match pitches to spatial stimuli where height and thickness were opposed (i.e., a thick line high in space vs. a thin line low in space), Dutch and Turkish differed in their relative preferences. Whereas Turkish participants predominantly opted for a thickness-pitch interpretation-even if this meant a reversal of height-pitch mappings-Dutch participants favored a height-pitch interpretation more often. These findings provide new evidence that speakers of different languages vary in their space-pitch associations, while at the same time showing such associations are not equally susceptible to linguistic influences. Some space-pitch (i.e., height-pitch) associations are more malleable than others (i.e., thickness-pitch)