Incremental processing in head-final child language: online comprehension of relative clauses in Turkish-speaking children and adults

Abstract

The present study investigates the parsing of pre-nominal relative clauses (RCs) in children for the first time with a realtime methodology that reveals moment-to-moment processing patterns as the sentence unfolds. A self-paced listening experiment with Turkish-speaking children (aged 5-8) and adults showed that both groups display a sign of processing cost both in subject and object RCs at different points through the flow of the utterance when integrating the cues that are uninformative (i.e., ambiguous in function) and that are structurally and probabilistically unexpected. Both groups show a processing facilitation as soon as the morphosyntactic dependencies are completed and parse the unbounded dependencies rapidly using the morphosyntactic cues rather than waiting for the clause-final filler. These findings show that five-year-old children show similar patterns to adults in processing the morphosyntactic cues incrementally and in forming expectations about the rest of the utterance on the basis of the probabilistic model of their language.

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

“…Some studies of Korean and Japanese, for example, have reported a subject processing advantage (Kanno & Nakamura, 2001;Kwon, 2008;Kwon, Kluender, Kutas, & Polinsky, 2010, Kwon et al, 2013Ishizuka, Nakatani, & Gibson, 2003;Miyamoto & Nakamura, 2003;Ueno & Garnsey, 2008), consistent with the predictions of phrase structure theories. On the other hand, research on Basque (Carreiras, Dunabeitia, Vergara, De La CruzPavia, & Laka, 2010), as well as some (but not all) studies of Chinese have reported an object RC processing advantage (Chen, Ning, Bi, & Dunlap, 2008;Gibson & Wu, 2013;Hsiao & Gibson, 2003;Jäger, Chen, Li, Lin, & Vasishth, 2015;Lin & Garnsey, 2007;Qiao, Shen, & Forster, 2012, but see Lin & Bever, 2006, Vasishth, Chen, Li, & Guo, 2013, consistent with the predictions of memory-based theories (see also Özge, Marinis, & Zeyrek, 2015, for discussion). The fact that cross-linguistic evidence does not unilaterally point to a subject RC processing advantage calls into question phrase structure theories, which, on theoretical grounds, predict this processing advantage to be universal.…”

“…Koizumi et al conclude that there is no universal preference during comprehension for subject before object structures; rather, the syntactic features of individual languages have differential effects on processing costs. Özge, Marinis, and Zeyrek (2015) investigate the processing of relative clauses. As discussed above, this is a literature with relatively extensive, though sometimes conflicting, cross-linguistic coverage.…”

Processing grammatical evidentiality and time reference in Turkish heritage and monolingual speakers

“…The author showed that, by the age of 6, children tend to understand both the relative clauses and the simple sentences equally well. Nonetheless, Özge, Marinis, and Zeyrek (2010) showed that Turkish children's (aged 5–8) production of object relatives (containing –DIK participle form) are prone to errors even in the oldest group.…”

Hemispheric Organization of Visual Word Recognition in Turkish Monolinguals

“…However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, there are very few studies that investigated Turkish language from a psycholinguistic perspective, which is spoken as a native language and being learned as a foreign / second language by millions of people today. The existing literature generally focuses on language pathology (Sadiyeva, 2004;Maviş & Özbabalık, 2006;Toğram, Çıkan & Duru, 2013;Ulusoy & Kuruoğlu, 2013), language learning and acquisition (Haznedar, 2007;Dolgunsöz & Sarıçoban, 2016;Tok & Yıgın, 2013;Sarıca, 2014;Özge, Marinis & Zeyrek, 2015) and bilingualism (Belet, 2009;Çeltek, 2014;Mergen & Kuruoğlu, 2016;2017). This study aimed to fi ll this gap in the literature by investigating lexical processing in Turkish, how emotional workload affect lexical processing of Turkish words and their hemispheric organization.…”