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

Language Learning, Recasts, and Interaction Involving AAC: Background and Potential for Intervention

For children with typical development, language is learned through everyday discursive interaction. Adults mediate child participation in such interactions through the deployment of a range of co-constructive strategies, including repeating, questioning, prompting, expanding, and reformulating the child’s utterances. Adult reformulations of child utterances, also known as recasts, have also been shown to relate to the acquisition of linguistic structures in children with language and learning disabilities and children and adults learning a foreign language. In this paper we discuss the theoretical basis and empirical evidence for the use of different types of recasts as a major language learning catalyst, and what may account for their facilitative effects. We consider the occurrence of different types of recasts in AAC-mediated interactions and their potential for language facilitation, within the typical operational and linguistic constraints of such interactions. We also consider the benefit of explicit and corrective forms of recasts for language facilitation in conversations with children who rely on AAC. We conclude by outlining future research directions

Ratunku! or just tunku! : evidence for the reliability and concurrent validity of the Language Use Inventory : LUI-Polish

Purpose: To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Polish-speaking children. This study aimed to adapt to Polish a standardized parent report measure, the Language Use Inventory (LUI; O’Neill, 2009, in order to enable cross-cultural comparisons and to use the LUI-Polish to screen for pragmatic development in children 18-47 months of age. We concentrated on the sociocultural and functional adaptation of LUI and aimed to demonstrate its reliability, developmental sensitivity, and concurrent validity. Method: Parents completed an online version of LUIPolish, longitudinally at 3 time points (when the child was 20, 32, and 44 months old). In addition, parents completed the Polish adaptations of the Questionnaire for Communication and Early Language at 22 months and the Language Development Survey at 24 months. Children’s spontaneous speech was assessed at 24 months, and their expressive and receptive vocabulary was assessed at 36 months. Results: All 3 parts of the LUI-Polish (Gestures, Words, and Sentences) showed very good levels of internal consistency at each time point. Significant correlations were observed between all parts of the LUI-Polish at all 3 measurement time points. The expected developmental trajectory was observed for boys and girls providing evidence of its developmental sensitivity for children between the ages of 2 and 4 years: an increase with age in the total score (due to an increase in Words and Sentences) and a decrease in Gestures. Supporting concurrent validity, significant correlations were found between children’s performance on (a) the LUI-Polish at 20 months and the Questionnaire for Communication and Early Language at 22 months as well as the Language Development Survey and spontaneous speech measures at 24 months and (b) the LUI-Polish at 32 months and the 2 measures of vocabulary comprehension and production at 36 months. Conclusion: The Polish adaptation of the LUI demonstrated good psychometric properties that provide a sound basis for cross-cultural comparisons and further research toward norming of the LUI-Polish. Moreover, the expected developmental trajectory in the pragmatic development of Polish children was observed

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

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

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

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