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This study reports on the evaluation of a "summer pre-school model" as an intervention measure. A 10-week program was designed to increase the school readiness of Turkish children from disadvantaged and multilingual environments by supporting their cognitive and linguistic skills during the summer prior to the start of school. The intervention consisted of a Pre-school Education Program with a special focus on Turkish language, pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills. The evaluation study was carried out on its first implementation in a southeastern province of Turkey where it was attended by bilingual six-year-olds. A pre-post, control-group, quasi experimental design was used with 92 intervention trained and 93 non-trained control children from the same neighborhoods. Compared to the control children the intervention children scored significantly higher on post-test measures of pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills, and on measures of syntactic knowledge and story comprehension. The results also revealed the importance of the educational level of the mother for progress in language skills. The findings indicate the overall short-term effectiveness of the program and of the summer pre-school model as a primary prevention strategy that aims to bring children at risk to a higher level of school readiness. (Contains 10 tables.)

Recent research has indicated that conceptual development in a specific domain may not be independent of the way it is mapped linguistically. We explore this claim in the semantic domain of evidentiality by considering various sets of data from Turkish-speaking children between one and a half to six years. We present evidence for (1) the appropriate use of grammaticalized markers of direct experience, inference, and linguistic report by age three, (2) the understanding of knowledge source ("theory of knowledge") around age four, (3) the understanding of linguistic form and knowledge source relationship ("theory of evidentiality") by age six, and (4) a predictive relationship between the use of the reported speech marker and memory for knowledge source around age four. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

This study investigated the premise that action, manifested here through pretend play, is a semiotic arena that can enhance narrative development. It was hypothesized that children would produce structurally more complex narratives in play-prompted elicitation than in direct elicitation conditions, and that this competence would increase with age. Thirty Turkish 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, with 10 children per age group, participated in the study. Children's narratives were analyzed according to a story grammar framework that differentiated between pre-episodic and episodic structures. A repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant effect between age and type of elicitation condition. Narratives displaying an episodic structure with temporal-causally integrated components were observed in the play-prompt elicitation condition by 4-year-olds and in the direct elicitation condition by 5-year-olds, supporting the hypothesis that action helps enhance narrative development. It is concluded that the emerging competence of children to construct narratives with episodic structures can best be observed in play contexts where action and objects scaffold both the conceptual organization and its expression.

This paper is a longitudinal investigation of adjective use by children aged 1;8-2;8, speaking Dutch, German, French, Hebrew, and Turkish, and by their caregivers. Each adjective token in transcripts of spontaneous speech was coded for semantic class. The development of adjective use in each semantic class was analysed by means of a multilevel logistic regression. The results show that toddlers and their parents use adjectives more often as the child grows older. However, this holds only for semantic classes denoting concrete concepts, such as physical properties, colour, and size. Adjectives denoting more abstract properties are barely used by children and parents throughout the first year of adjective acquisition. The correlations between adjective frequencies in child speech and child-directed speech are very strong at the beginning, but decrease with time as the child develops independent adjective use. The composition of early adjective lexicons is very similar in the five languages under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]