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We provide an overview of a structural priming study in Turkish and an analysis of the data using logit mixed-effects modeling. As Turkish is an agglutinative language, it constitutes a unique testing ground for the universal and language-specific aspects of structural priming and linguistic representations. Using the idiosyncratic properties of Turkish, this study demonstrates priming effects in written production of Turkish by adult native speakers. The structures of interest are possessive noun phrases (nominal structure) (e.g. Ali[Ayse-nin ses-in]-i duydu: Ali [Ayse-GEN voice-3SG.POSS]-ACC heard “Ali heard [Ayse’s voice]”) and noun clauses (verbal structure) which are embedded complementizer phrases with a genitive subject and a nominalized verbal predicate (e.g. Ali[Ayse-nin git-tig-in]-i duydu: Ali [Ayse-GEN leave-VN-3SG.POSS]-ACC heard “Ali heard [that Ayse was leaving/(had) left]”. Certain verbs such as duy- (“to hear”) allow both such nominal and verbal structures as their direct object. The two structures have the same GEN-POSS morphology, but different inner constituents. Participants completed sentence target fragments (which are equally likely to be completed with either type under normal circumstances) with more nominal structures after nominal primes and with more verbal structures after verbal primes, which indicates a significant priming effect. Structural priming accesses the inner nominal vs. verbal constituents of these structures and is sensitive to the distinction between phrases and clauses. Despite their identical external morphological template, the two structures are represented distinctly and not as a single, general GEN-POSS form in Turkish native speakers’ minds.

Although other animals can make simple tools, the expanded and complex material culture of humans is unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Tool making is a slow and late-developing ability in humans, and preschool children find making tools to solve problems very challenging. This difficulty in tool making might be related to the lack of familiarity with the tools and may be overcome by children's long term perceptual-motor knowledge. Thus, in this study, the effect of tool familiarity on tool making was investigated with a task in which 5-to-6-year-old children (n = 75) were asked to remove a small bucket from a vertical tube. The results show that children are better at tool making if the tool and its relation to the task are familiar to them (e.g., soda straw). Moreover, we also replicated the finding that hierarchical complexity and tool making were significantly related. Results are discussed in light of the ideomotor approach.

During the last decade, the ontogeny of tool making has received growing attention in the literature on tool-related behaviors. However, the cognitive demands underlying tool making are still not clearly understood. In this cross-sectional study of 52 Turkish preschool children from 3 to 6 years of age, the roles of executive function (response inhibition), ability to form hierarchical representations (hierarchical structuring), and social learning were investigated with the hook task previously used with children and animals. In this task, children needed to bend a pipe cleaner to fetch a small bucket with a sticker out of a tall jar. This study replicated earlier findings that preschoolers have great difficulty in tool innovation. However, social learning facilitates tool making, especially after 5 years of age. Capacities to form hierarchical representations and to inhibit prepotent responses were significant positive predictors of tool making after social learning.

WOS: 000520798900001 PubMed: 32189183 The goal of this study is to investigate whether or not Turkish has a particular preference in ambiguity resolution of relative clause attachment when two possible NPs are available as in "Someone shot [NP1 the servant] of [NP2 the actress] [RC who was on the balcony]& x2ee;. The relevant literature has showed that RC attachment preferences-whether NP1 or NP2-vary across languages, which results in contradictory evidence if some universal processing principle is assumed. Turkish differs typologically from English and other European languages in the construction of RC using complex "genitive-possessor" construction. In order to make a valid cross-linguistic comparison it is therefore of particular importance to carefully control potential extraneous factors which might obstruct true attachment preferences-if they exist. The present study, which controls various confounding factors, reveals that both syntactic and non-syntactic factors should be taken into consideration when constructing the stimulus sentences for testing attachment ambiguity resolution. Specifically, we propose that the semantic relations (e.g. part-whole relations) between the noun phrases of the genitive-possessive construction and the semantic associations with the proximal as well as with the distal predicate play a key role in the attachment preferences of monolingual Turkish native speakers in this type of ambiguous sentences. When these extraneous factors were controlled, no preference was observed. TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey)Turkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK) We wish to acknowledge TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) for the doctoral scholarship granted to the first author, and to thank two anonymous academics who reviewed and commented on the Turkish stimulus material.

This commentary construes the relation between the two systems of temporal updating and temporal reasoning as a bifurcation and tracks it across three time scales: phylogeny, ontogeny, and microgeny. In taking a dynamic systems approach, flexibility, as mentioned by Hoerl & McCormack, is revealed as the key characteristic of human temporal cognition.

Cross-cultural differences in argumentation may be explained by the use of different norms of reasoning. However, some norms derive from, presumably universal, mathematical laws. This inconsistency can be resolved, by considering that some norms of argumentation, like Bayes theorem, are mathematical functions. Systematic variation in the inputs may produce culture-dependent inductive biases although the function remains invariant. This hypothesis was tested by fitting a Bayesian model to data on informal argumentation from Turkish and English cultures, which linguistically mark evidence quality differently. The experiment varied evidential marking and informant reliability in argumentative dialogues and revealed cross-cultural differences for both independent variables. The Bayesian model fitted the data from both cultures well but there were differences in the parameters consistent with culture-specific inductive biases. These findings are related to current controversies over the universality of the norms of reasoning and the role of normative theories in the psychology of reasoning.

Two studies investigated young 2- and 3-year-old Turkish children's developing understanding of normativity and freedom to act in games. As expected, children, especially 3-year-olds, protested more when there was a norm violation than when there was none. Surprisingly, however, no decrease in normative protest was observed even when the actor violated the norms due to a physical constraint, and not due to unwillingness. The increase in helping responses in this case lends support to the idea that at these ages, children could not yet incorporate an actor's freedom to act in line with his will as they respond to norm transgressions. The results of the two studies are discussed in the light of two general research issues: a) the importance of cross-cultural research, and b) the interaction of the cognitive system with the emotional-empathic system in development.

It is known that concurrent non-temporal tasks shorten reproduced temporal durations in prospective duration judgments. Two experiments were carried out, one comparing a concurrent temporal task to a minimally demanding concurrent task (Experiment 1) and one comparing an executive concurrent (Simon) task with a less demanding non-executive concurrent task (Experiment 2). An effect of the concurrent task type on temporal reproductions was found. Furthermore, a duration length effect was found, where longer durations were underestimated more than shorter durations. This effect tended to be stronger for the experiments that included a concurrent task that demanded high attention.

Most studies of infant cognition focus on group data from single domains. Yet, without the multidomain testing of the same infants longitudinally, such data cannot be used to evaluate whether the timing of cognitive change occurs in a domain-general or a domain-specific way. We present the results of a longitudinal study pooling data from three European laboratories set up identically. Over 100 healthy, monolingual infants each underwent multi-domain testing at 6 and again at 10 months in six experimental tasks (speech processing, face processing, and action/event processing), as well as a videotaped 3-minute recording of mother/infant dyads in a play session with an identical set of toys. Previous research examined the effects of maternal sensitivity only on general intelligence measures, but our approach is novel in that it assessed dyadic effects on specific cognitive domains, attempting to pinpoint in finer detail the effects of mother-infant dyadic interaction on the timing of cognitive change. Our findings highlight the importance of a multi-domain approach, in that unlike the assumptions drawn from cross-sectional data, our longitudinal study yielded different developmental timing across domains within the same infants. Our results also highlight a crucial difference: at the group level 6- and 10-month-olds display the expected effects found in previous research, but when re-analysed according to mother-child interaction ratings, the quality of dyadic interaction style turned out to subtly foster or delay development in domainspecific and age-specific ways, contributing to the range of individual differences in timing that we observe in cognitive development over the first year of life.

The present study investigates whether the maternal interaction style is related to 6-month-old infants' action interpretation. We tested 6-month-olds ability to interpret an unfamiliar human action as goal-directed using a modified version of the paradigm used by Woodward, A. L. (1999). Infant's ability to distinguish between purposeful and non-purposeful behaviours. Infant Behavior & Development, 22, 145-160 and Kiraly, I., Jovanovic, B., Prinz, W., Aschersleben, G., & Gergely, G. (2003). The early origins of goal attribution in infancy. Consciousness & Cognition, 12, 732-751. Additionally, all infants and their mothers participated in a free play situation to assess maternal interaction styles as measured by the CARE-Index. According to mothers' distinct interaction styles, infants were divided into three groups. Results suggest that at 6 months of age infants of mothers with a modestly controlling interaction style are better at interpreting a human action as goal-directed than infants of sensitive and relative unresponsive mothers. The ability to understand human action as goal-directed might be a corollary of an adaptive strategy in infancy.

The infancy literature situates the perceptual narrowing of speech sounds at around 10 months of age, but little is known about the mechanisms that influence individual differences in this developmental milestone. We hypothesized that such differences might in part be explained by characteristics of mother-child interaction. Infant sensitivity to syllables from their native tongue was compared longitudinally to sensitivity to non-native phonemes, at 6 months and again at 10 months. We replicated previous findings that at the group level, both 6- and 10- month-olds were able to discriminate contrasts in their native language, but only 6-month-olds succeeded in discriminating contrasts in the non-native language. However, when discrimination was assessed for separate groups on the basis of mother-child interaction—a ‘high contingency group’ and a ‘moderate contingency’ group—the vast majority of infants in both groups showed the expected developmental pattern by 10 months, but only infants in the ‘high contingency’ group showed early specialization for their native phonemes by failing to discriminate non-native contrasts at 6-months. The findings suggest that the quality of mother-child interaction is one of the exogenous factors influencing the timing of infant specialization for speech processing., This study was made possible by a grant to AK-S from Procter & Gamble International, Geneva, Switzerland, from which was formed the Pampers European Research Consortium (PERC).

This study addresses the relation between early cognitive development and mother–infant interaction. Infants at the age of 6 and 10 months recruited from labs in three European countries – Germany, Great Britain, and France – were tested on two cognitive tasks: understanding of goal-directed human action and physical causality. Mother–infant interaction was assessed with the CARE-Index. In the goal-directed action task, the overall sample of the 6-month olds did not yet reliably discriminate between an object-change and a path-change trial while a subsample of infants of modestly controlling mothers did. All infants at 10 months of age showed discrimination. In the physical causality task, the overall sample of the 6-month olds did not yet reliably discriminate between an expected and an unexpected launching event. At 10 months of age, the overall sample showed discrimination, due to the major subsample of infants of highly sensitive mothers. Our findings support the view that exogenous factors influence cognitive development within a particular time window, in highly specific ways, depending on the age of the subjects, the cognitive domain, and the quality of mother–infant interaction.

In this chapter, language development is discussed within a social-emotional framework. Children’s language processing is gated by social and emotional aspects of the interaction, such as affective prosodic and facial expression, contingent reactions, and joint attention. Infants and children attend to both cognitive and affective aspects in language perception (“language” vs. “paralanguage”) and in language production (“effort” vs. “engagement”). Deaf children acquiring a sign language go through the same developmental milestones in this respect. Modality-independently, a tripartite developmental sequence emerges: (i) an undifferentiated affect-dominated system governs the child’s behavior, (ii) a cognitive and language-dominated system emerges that attenuates the affective system, (iii) emotional expression is re-integrated into cognition and language. This tightly integrated cognitive-affective language system is characteristic of adults. Evolutionary scenarios are discussed that might underlie its ontogeny. The emotional context of learning might influence the course and outcome of L2-learning, too.

This article outlines a nonlinear dynamic systems approach to language learning on the basis of developmental cognitive neuroscience. Language learning, on this view, is a process of experience-dependent shaping and selection of broadly defined domain-general and domain-specific genetic predispositions. The central concept of development is (neuro) cognitive growth in terms of self-organization. Linguistic structure-building is synergetic and emergent insofar as the acquisition of a critical mass of elements on a local level (e.g., words) results in the emergence of novel qualities and units on a macroscopic level (e.g., syntax). We argue that language development does not take a linear path but comes in phases of intermittent turbulence, fluctuation, and stability, along a "chaotic itinerary". We review qualitative, quantitative and computational applications of this concept in the lexical, morphological, and syntactic domain. We identify as the most significant property of the dynamic approach the temporal nature of language learning. As a medium-term forecast we anticipate a further diversification of the dynamic approach, an increase in more formal approaches, and a stronger interest in issues of embodiment and embeddedness.

‘Learning’, in a very broad sense of cognitive psychology, is defined as ‘‘a relatively permanent change in an organism’s potential for responding that results from prior experience or practice’’ (Gordon 1989: 6). This special issue will deal with learning in a more narrow sense, with learning in human beings and, more specifically, with language learning. Due to its association with early behaviorism, ‘language learning’ has long been a frowned upon notion. It was substituted with the term ‘language acquisition’ by researchers with a generativist agenda. In opposition to the empiricist tradition, they established new notions along with a new linguistic paradigm — generative grammar. ‘Learning’ has not only been largely banned from the linguistic literature but it has also received less attention in cognitive psychology, due to the ‘‘cognitive revolution’’ (Baars 1986) instigated by Chomsky (1957, 1959). One of the consequences of this paradigmatic turn was that new information processing models emphasized knowledge representation and de-emphasized the learning process (Glaser 1990; Reber 1993: 4). In this special issue, we take a fresh look at the old controversy in the light of novel and challenging approaches which have arrived recently in the field — implicit modes of learning, bootstrapping, optimality theory, connectionism, usage-based and emergentist approaches, self-organizing and dynamic systems. In this introductory paper we will set the scene for the articles to come: In Section 1 we will start out with a clarification of basic terms like development, learning, and acquisition. 2 In Section 2 we will briefly recapitulate the various stages in the debate between rationalists and empiricists up to now. In Sections 3 and 4 more recent approaches will be characterized before, in Section 5, the outline of the special issue including the individual papers will be summarized.

This article is concerned with the "word" in sign language, the "grammatical" and especially the "prosodic word". Both notions of the "word" are central in sign language linguistics and psycholinguistic. Converging evidence for the size and complexity of the prosodic word is reviewed, stemming from morphological processes such as compounding, derivation, and classification as well as from phonological processes such as coalescence, epenthesis, and deletion. Additional evidence from slips of the hand and their repairs is presented showing that (i) in slips, grammatical as well as prosodic words are involved and that (ii) slip-repair sequences may keep within the limit of the prosodic word. The distinctive morphological typology and the canonical word shape pattern in sign language is explained by modality differences which act on the Phonetic Form (PF) interface. Sign languages are processed more on the vertical axis - simultaneously - whereas spoken languages are processed more on the horizontal axis - sequentially. As a corollary, the information packaging in both language modalities is different while processing is basically the same. Controversial theoretic topics around the notion of the "word" in sign language such as iconicity and notoriously recalcitrant constructions such as classifier predicates are discussed.

Mehrsprachigkeit und Multi- oder Interkulturalitat sind Begriffe, die aus aktuellen gesellschaftspolitischen Debatten nicht wegzudenken sind. Fast taglich gibt es neue Diskussionsbeitrage und Schlagzeilen dazu, die PISA-Ergebnisse schrecken Padagogen und Politiker auf: Kinder mit Migrationshintergrund haben besonders schlechte Bildungschancen und nicht ausreichende Sprachkenntnisse werden als eine Ursache des Ubels ausgemacht. Es ist kaum noch moglich, sich einen vollstandigen Uberblick uber Sprachforderprogramme, Sprachstandsverfahren und Fortbildungen fur Erzieher/innen und Lehrer/innen zu verschaffen, die in den letzten Jahren auf den padagogischen Markt geworfen wurden (vgl. Jampert et al. 2005). Den Verantwortlichen in Ministerien, Sozial- und Schulbehorden wird deutlich, dass Deutschland nicht (mehr?) einsprachig ist. Eine neue Sensibilitat fur Zweioder Mehrsprachigkeit, vor allem fur kindliche Mehrsprachigkeit, sit erwacht. (Die Begriffe ›Zweisprachigkeit‹ und ›Mehrsprachigkeit‹ werden in der Regel gleichbedeutend verwendet, denn der Erwerb einer dritten oder vierten Sprache erfolgt im Prinzip genauso wie der Erwerb einer zweiten Sprache.)

Die moderne Textlinguistik beschaftigt sich mit Texten und untersucht ihre sprachlichen Strukturen, ihre kommunikativen Funktionen und ihre kognitive Verarbeitung. Was aber sind Texte? Ist ein Kassenzettel ein Text? Ein Telefonbucheintrag? Eine Tabelle mit Daten? Und was haben diese Texte mit einem Gedicht, einem wissenschaftlichen Handbuchartikel, einem Roman oder einem Brief gemeinsam? Es gibt Texte in den unterschiedlichsten Formen und Variationen mit den verschiedensten Funktionen, und es ist ein Ziel der linguistischen Textanalyse, diese Vielfalt an textuellen Erscheinungsformen mittels einheitlicher linguistischer Kriterien zu beschreiben und als Textexemplare zu erklaren. Texte sind auch Untersuchungsgegenstand anderer philologischer Disziplinen wie Literaturwissenschaft, Geschichtswissenschaft, Theologie, Jurisprudenz, Padagogik und Psychologie. Jede dieser Disziplinen verfolgt jedoch die Analyse von ausgewahlten Texten unter verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten und mit unterschiedlichen Zielen, wobei vor allem Aspekte des Inhalts und der interpretativen (bzw. hermeneutischen) Auslegung im Vordergrund stehen. In der Linguistik werden dagegen erstens alle (moglichen) Texte berucksichtigt und zweitens Texte per se als sprachliche Gebilde mit ihren spezifischen Struktur- und Verknupfungsmerkmalen betrachtet.

In diesem Kapitel geht es um die Frage, was die Linguistik zur Analyse der Literatur beitragen kann. Zunachst konnen wir feststellen, dass eine Voraussetzung dafur, dass es etwas wie Literatur uberhaupt gibt, die menschliche Sprache ist. Ohne Sprache kann es Literatur nicht geben. Literatur ist etwas, das Sprachbenutzer fur Sprachbenutzer herstellen. Da die Linguistik grundsatzlich alle Texte hinsichtlich ihrer sprachlichen Struktur und Verwendung untersucht, gehort auch die Literatur zu ihrem Untersuchungsgegenstand (Jakobson 1987). Ob sich umgekehrt die Literaturwissenschaft mit der Analyse der Sprache befasst oder befassen soll, ist umstritten. Naturlich gibt es Disziplinen wie die Rhetorik und die Stilistik, die gewisse Beruhrungspunkte mit der Linguistik haben und zugleich der Literaturwissenschaft nahestehen. Aber viele Literaturwissenschaftler sind doch der Meinung, dass ihr eigentlicher Gegenstand, die Deutung literarischer Kunstwerke im historischen und kulturellen Kontext, von der Linguistik nicht beruhrt werde. Dagegen lasst sich Folgendes einwenden: Wenn es zum Aufgabenbereich der Literaturwissenschaft gehort, sich mit dem Funktionieren der Sprache in der Literatur zu beschaftigen, dann muss sie sich auch mit dem sprachlichen System und seiner Verwendung, also dem Gegenstand der Linguistik, befassen.

Nicht alle Fragen, die man sich als Linguistin stellt, sind nur mit empirischer Forschung zu beantworten. Angenommen, Sie wurden wissen wollen, ob im Deutschen das pradikative Adjektiv — wie etwa in den romanischen Sprachen, vgl. die Beispiele in (1) — flektiert wird, so konnen Sie sich sicher auf Ihr eigenes Sprachvermogen als kompetenter Sprecher des Deutschen verlassen. Sie betrachten also ein paar Satze mit pradikativen Adjektiven wie in (2). (1) Ce lecteur est intelligent/Cette lectrice est intelligente/Nos lecteurs sont intelligents. (2) Dieser Leser ist klug/Diese Leserin ist klug (*kluge)/Unsere Leser sind klug (*kluge). Dabei konnen Sie feststellen, dass hier das Adjektiv nicht flektiert wird. Vorsichtshalber uberprufen Sie noch, ob klug denn uberhaupt flektierbar ist (manche Adjektive wie lila z. B. werden ja von vielen Sprechern des Deutschen nicht flektiert), aber da es fur Sie eindeutig die kluge Leserin und die klugen Leser heist und es keinerlei Anlass fur die Annahme gibt, dass sich das bei irgendeinem kompetenten Sprecher des Deutschen anders verhalt, ist die Frage beantwortet, ohne dass man eine reprasentative Auswahl von Sprechern des Deutschen hatte befragen oder endlose Textkorpora durchsuchen mussen.