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In languages with evidential marking, utterances consist of an informational content and a specification of the mode of access to that information. In this first longitudinal study investigating the acquisition of the Turkish evidential marker "-mIs" in naturalistic child-caregiver interactions, we examined six children between 8 and 36 months of age. We charted individual differences in child and caregiver speech over time by conducting growth curve analyses. Children followed a similar course of acquisition in terms of the proportion of the marker in overall speech. However, children exhibited differences with respect to the order of emergence of different evidential functions (e.g., inference, hearsay), where each child showed a unique pattern irrespective of the frequency in caregiver input. Nonfactual use of the marker was very frequent in child and caregiver speech, where high-SES caregivers mostly produced the marker during story-telling and pretend play, and low-SES caregivers for regulating the child's behavior.

This study investigates how children lexicalize motion events in their first and second languages, L1-Turkish and L2-English. English is a satellite-framed language that conflates motion with manner expressed in the main verb and path in a non-verbal element, whereas Turkish is a verb-framed language that conflates motion with path in the main verb and expresses manner in a subordinated verb. We asked three questions: (1) Does early L2 acquisition in an L1 dominant society affect motion event lexicalization in L1? (2) Is the effect of L2 on L1 subject to change due to decline in L2 exposure? (3) Do L1 vs. L2 lexicalizations differ within the bilingual mind? One hundred and twelve 5- and 7-year-old monolingual and bilingual children watched and described video-clips depicting motion events. For L1 descriptions, 5-year-old bilinguals used more manner structures than monolinguals. No difference was found for 7-year-olds. For L2 descriptions, 7-year-old bilinguals used more manner-only constructions compared to their L1 descriptions. For 5-year-old bilinguals no difference was found. Findings suggest that early exposure to a second language had an impact on how motion events are packaged, while decline in L2 exposure dampened the effects of L2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports on the evaluation of a 'summer-preschool 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 Preschool 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to explore whether the development of source memory is related to the use of linguistic markers of evidentiality. Eighty-seven 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old Turkish-speaking monolingual children participated in two source memory tasks: (1) Mode of Knowledge Acquisition Task and (2) Source Identification Task, and three language tasks (1) Direct Experience Task, (2) Inference Task and (3) Reportative Task. Results of the source memory tasks revealed lower performance for 3-year-old children compared to older children. On the Direct Experience Task, children of all ages could use the -DI inflection correctly, but in the other two language tasks younger children displayed lower performance than older children in using the correct evidentiality markers. Children's performance in using (I)mIş on the Reportative Task was found to predict their performance on the Source Identification Task. Moreover, children's performance on this source memory task was compared to English-speaking children's performance on the same task in Drummey and Newcombe's (2002) study. This comparison indicated that Turkish-speaking children show correct source identification performance at an earlier age compared to English-speaking children. The findings are discussed in terms of the development of source memory and the relation between language and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the interface of tense, aspect and modality in using Turkish adverbs. Since the Turkish language has multifunctional verbal inflections manifesting temporal, aspectual and modal notions, it is appropriate for the examination of the interface between adverbs and morphology. A brief discussion of the interaction between two adverbs with tense-aspect-modality operators is provided, along with a chart of the temporal and aspectual contexts for the use of az kalsm and nerdeyse.