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Starting as early as 10 months of age, gesturing is present in the communicative repertoire of children, and later, around the age of two, it is integrated with speech, yielding multimodal utterances. However, children's propensity to gesture varies, and the mechanisms underlying these individual differences remain unknown. The present study tests whether gesture production in the presence of speech (bimodal gestures) or in the absence of speech (unimodal gestures) is predicted by working memory and articulation performance associated with verbal processing. Children aged 22–46 months were presented with a gesture elicitation task in which they needed to correct the actions of a puppet using everyday objects in an unconventional way. Working memory was measured by the Imitation Sorting Task (IST) and articulation performance was indexed by the Non-Word Repetition Task (NWR). It was revealed that any increase in working memory capacity was linked to a higher incidence rate of gesturing in toddlers and working memory was differentially associated with the production of unimodal and bimodal gestures. When gestures were produced without speech, they primarily relied on attentional processes as indicated by working memory capacity. Conversely, when gestures were produced with speech, it was the articulation performance supporting speech processing that predicted the number of bimodal gestures. Overall, unimodal and bimodal gestures seem to have different working memory demands.

The present study examines input–output relations in the emergence of verbal affixes that mark modal distinctions in Turkish, a morphologically rich language. Longitudinal naturalistic speech data were analyzed from two girls between ages 1;3–2;6 and their caregivers. Four stages of development were identified. Significant associations between verb inflection and modal notion, observed to be stable across the stages in the input, were noted to develop gradually in the children’s speech. Order of emergence of modal inflections was found to be related to input frequency and transparency of inflectional types, whereas development of inflectional paradigms was observed to be related to inflectional diversity. Conceptual accessibility and pragmatic relevance of the modal notions were considered as child-related factors in this development.

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 th...

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.

WOS: 000341676600010, This study presents the pioneering data on the neurological representation of grammatically marked evidentials with regard to their dissolution in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Across two tasks, we investigated the production of finite verb inflections for evidential categories and identification of the information sources these evidential categories are mapped on in Turkish individuals with agrammatic aphasia. In Turkish, information source is grammatically marked for three different past contexts: direct perception, reportative, and inferential. The following research questions were explored: (1) is inflection for different evidential categories equally affected in Turkish agrammatic aphasia? (2) Is identifying the categories of information source impaired? Turkish agrammatic speakers and non-brain-damaged speakers (NBDs) were tested with a production and a source identification tasks. Our findings demonstrate that in Turkish agrammatic speakers the direct perception evidential was more affected in production than the inferential and reportative evidentials. However, the agrammatic speakers retained the ability to identify the source for the direct perception. We argue that information source values conveyed by evidential forms are impaired in agrammatic aphasia. These findings are discussed on the basis of earlier studies to time reference and tense in agrammatism