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This study examines the emergence of concurrent correlates of infant pointing frequency with the aim to contribute to its ontogenetic theories and provide a first step in developing targeted interventions to support infants' pointing and language development. We measured monthly from 8 to 12 months infants’ (N=56) index-finger pointing frequency along with several candidate correlates: (1) family socioeconomic status (SES, based on maternal education), (2) caregivers’ pointing production, and (3) infants’ point following to targets in front of and behind them. Results revealed that (1) infants increased their pointing frequency across age, but high-SES infants had a steeper increase, and a higher pointing frequency from the beginning than low-SES infants, (2) caregiver pointing frequency was not associated with infant pointing frequency at any age, (3) infants’ point following abilities to targets behind was positively associated with infant pointing at 12 months, after pointing had already emerged around 10 months. Findings suggest that family SES impacts infants’ pointing development more generally, not just through caregiver pointing. The association between pointing and point following to targets behind, but not in front, suggests that a higher level of referential understanding emerges after, perhaps through production of pointing.

This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in causal expressions influence the mapping of causal language on causal events in three- to four-year-old Swiss-German learners and Turkish learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed syntactically with lexical causatives (e.g., asse 'to eat' vs. fuettere 'to feed'). In Turkish, causality is expressed both syntactically and morphologically - with a verbal suffix (e.g., yemek 'to eat' vs. yeDIRmek 'to feed'). Moreover, unlike Swiss-German, Turkish allows argument ellipsis (e.g., 'The mother feeds empty set). Here, we used pseudo-verbs to test whether and how well Swiss-German-learning children inferred a causal meaning from lexical causatives compared to Turkish-learning children tested in three conditions: lexical causatives, morphological causatives, and morphological causatives with object ellipsis. Swiss-German-learning children and Turkish-learning children in all three conditions reliably inferred causal meanings, and did so to a similar extent. The findings suggest that, as young as age 3, children learning two different languages similarly make use of language-specific causality cues (syntactic and morphological alike) to infer causal meanings., Swiss National Foundation

Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation between utterances is necessary to support acquisition of a fully productive grammar. When individual words or morphemes are repeated, but embedded in different lexical and syntactic contexts, the child has more information about how these forms may be used and combined. Corpus analysis has shown that these partial repetitions frequently occur in clusters, which have been coined variation sets. More recent research has introduced algorithms that can extract these variation sets automatically from corpora with the goal of measuring their relative prevalence across ages and languages. Longitudinal analyses have revealed that rates of variation sets tend to decrease as children get older. We extend this research in several ways. First, we consider a maximally diverse sample of languages, both genealogically and geographically, to test the generalizability of developmental trends. Second, we compare multiple levels of repetition, both words and morphemes, to account for typological differences in how information is encoded. Third, we consider several additional measures of development to account for deficiencies in age as a measure of linguistic aptitude. Fourth, we examine whether the levels of repetition found in child-surrounding speech is greater or less than what would have been expected by chance. This analysis produced a new measure, redundancy, which captures how repetitive speech is on average given how repeititive it could have been. Fifth, we compare rates of repetition in child-surrounding and adult-directed speech to test whether variation sets are especially prevalent in child-surrounding speech. We find that (1) some languages show increases in repetition over development, (2) true estimates of variation sets are generally lower than or equal to random baselines, (3) these patterns are largely convergent across developmental indices, and (4) adult-directed speech is reliably less redundant, though in some cases more repetitive, than child-surrounding speech. These results are discussed with respect to features of the corpora, typological properties of the languages, and differential rates of change in repetition and redundancy over children's development., European Union (EU); European Research Council (ERC), European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013); Swiss National Science Foundation

Using a cross-linguistic approach, we investigated Turkish-speaking children's acquisition and use of relative clauses (RCs) by examining longitudinal child–caregiver interactions and cross-sectional peer conversations. Longitudinal data were collected from 8 children between the ages of 8 and 36 months. Peer conversational corpus came from 78 children aged between 43 and 64 months. Children produced RCs later than in English (Diessel, 2004) and Mandarin (Chen & Shirai, 2015), and demonstrated increasing semantic and structural complexity with age. Despite the morphosyntactic difficulty of object RCs, and prior experimental findings showing a subject RC advantage, preschool-aged children produced object RCs, which were highly frequent in child-directed speech, as frequently as subject RCs. Object RCs in spontaneous speech were semantically less demanding (with pronominal subjects and inanimate head nouns) than the stimuli used in prior experiments. Results suggest that multiple factors such as input frequency and morphosyntactic and semantic difficulty affect the acquisition patterns.

This study used an online second language (L2) vocabulary lesson to evaluate whether the physical body (i.e., embodiment) of a robot tutor has an impact on how the learner learns from the robot. In addition, we tested how individual differences in attitudes toward robots, first impressions of the robot, anxiety in learning L2, and personality traits may be related to L2 vocabulary learning. One hundred Turkish-speaking young adults were taught eight English words in a one-on-one Zoom session either with a NAO robot tutor (N = 50) or with a voice-only tutor (N = 50). The findings showed that participants learned the vocabulary equally well from the robot and voice tutors, indicating that the physical embodiment of the robot did not change learning gains in a short vocabulary lesson. Further, negative attitudes toward robots had negative effects on learning for participants in the robot tutor condition, but first impressions did not predict vocabulary learning in either of the two conditions. L2 anxiety, on the other hand, negatively predicted learning outcomes in both conditions. We also report that attitudes toward robots and the impressions of the robot tutor remained unchanged before and after the lesson. As one of the first to examine the effectiveness of robots as an online lecturer, this study presents an example of comparable learning outcomes regardless of physical embodiment., Sabancı University Institutional Research Fund; Koç University Institutional Research Fund

Young children have difficulties understanding untypical causal relations. While we know that hearing a causal description facilitates this understanding, less is known about what particular features of causal language are responsible for this facilitation. Here, we asked: (1) Do syntactic and morphological cues in the grammatical structure of sentences facilitate the extraction of causal meaning, and (2) do these different cues influence this facilitation to a different degree. We studied children learning either Swiss-German or Turkish, two languages which differ in their expression of causality. Swiss-German predominantly uses lexical causatives (e.g., schniidä (cut)), which lack a formal marker to denote causality. Turkish, alongside lexical causatives, uses morphological causatives, which formally mark causation (e.g., ye (eat) vs. yeDIr (feed)). We assessed 2.5- to 3.5-year-old children’s understanding of untypical cause-effect relations described with either non-causal language (e.g., Here is a cube and a car) or causal language using a pseudo-verb (e.g., lexical: The cube gorps the car). We tested n = 135 Turkish-learning (non-causal, lexical, and morphological conditions) and n = 90 Swiss-German-learning children (non-causal and lexical conditions). Children in both language groups performed better in the causal language condition(s) than the non-causal language condition. Further, Turkish-learning children’s performance in both the lexical and morphological conditions was similar to Swiss-German-learning children in the lexical condition, and did not differ from each other. These findings suggest that the structural cues of causal language support children’s understanding of untypical causal relations, regardless of the type of construction.

Young children have difficulties in understanding untypical causal relations. Although we know that hearing a causal description facilitates this understanding, less is known about what particular features of causal language are responsible for this facilitation. Here, we asked two questions. First, do syntactic and morphological cues in the grammatical structure of sentences facilitate the extraction of causal meaning? Second, do these different cues influence this facilitation to different degrees? We studied children learning either Swiss German or Turkish, two languages that differ in their expression of causality. Swiss German predominantly uses lexical causatives (e.g., schniidä [cut]), which lack a formal marker to denote causality. Turkish, alongside lexical causatives, uses morphological causatives, which formally mark causation (e.g., ye [eat] vs. yeDIr [feed]). We tested 2.5- to 3.5-year-old children's understanding of untypical cause–effect relations described with either noncausal language (e.g., Here is a cube and a car) or causal language using a pseudo-verb (e.g., lexical: The cube gorps the car). We tested 135 Turkish-learning children (noncausal, lexical, and morphological conditions) and 90 Swiss-German-learning children (noncausal and lexical conditions). Children in both language groups performed better in the causal language condition(s) than in the noncausal language condition. Furthermore, Turkish-learning children's performance in both the lexical and morphological conditions was similar to that of Swiss-German-learning children in the lexical condition and did not differ from each other. These findings suggest that the structural cues of causal language support children's understanding of untypical causal relations regardless of the type of construction., NA

Digital tools provide unique ways to support young language learners. To design and use these tools effectively, their strengths and shortcomings must be carefully evaluated. This chapter addresses how digital tools may transform the nature of social and physical interaction of children, focusing on vocabulary and narrative development in first and second language. The tools featured are social robots, augmented reality, virtual reality, virtual agents, and tangible user interfaces. We discuss the ways in which each of these tools can scaffold language development in children, and review the studies investigating their effectiveness. While further research is needed, current evidence indicates the high potential of these interactive technologies as scaffolding tools for children’s language development. This chapter suggests that digital tools can create novel forms of interactions for children and are especially beneficial for children with special needs and in assisting classroom teachers.

Adults incrementally integrate multiple sources of information to predict the upcoming linguistic structure. Although we have substantial evidence that children can use lexicosemantic information triggered by the verb, we have limited information as to whether children can use morphosyntax to generate predictions during the course of processing. Previous studies show that four-year-old Turkish-speaking children can use case-marking cues predictively; however German-speaking children have been reported to fail until late in development. The present visual-world eye-tracking study provides the first evidence from four-year-old German-speaking children (mean age: 4;03) interpreting sentence initial case marking cues independent of the identity of the verb and the canonical word order to predict the thematic role of the upcoming argument. We presented children with a visual context with a stereotypical but ambiguous event, the thematic structure of which can be resolved only on the basis of the case marking cues on subject-initial and object-initial structures locating the verb sentence-finally. Children were able to use the accusative case on the non-canonical object-initial utterances to predict that the upcoming argument should have the agent role before this argument and the verb became available. This study shows that the previously reported discrepancy between these two case-marking languages (i.e., Turkish and German) is not due to the crosslinguistic differences but due to methodological differences employed across studies. These findings provide support for language acquisition theories assuming early abstractions and adult-like parsing mechanisms predictively integrating multiple sources of cues.

To examine nonverbal behaviors that may differentiate between lie- and truth-tellers, recent studies have relied on collective interviews (e.g., Vrij and Granhag in Appl Cognit Psychol 28(6):936–944, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3071 ), where participants were solicited to fake their responses about an unexperienced event. In this study, we made participants experience actual events that involved a potential rule violation, and later interviewed them collectively and unanticipatedly about these previously experienced events. Ninety same-sex preschool dyads were observed in a temptation resistance paradigm, where an adult experimenter proscribed touching of attractive toys and left the children alone. The dyads of children were later interviewed by the experimenter about how they handled this rule. Nonverbal behaviors were coded during the entire interview phase where they could lie by withholding transgression (i.e., lying by omission) and right after a target question where children chose to lie or tell the truth (i.e., lying by commission). Truth-tellers and lie-tellers showed (1) differences in response latency, looking at friend, and use of gestures right after the target question, but were (2) similar in their interactive nonverbal behaviors during the entire interview (i.e., speech transition, looking at friend, and utterance rate). This is the first study showing that nonverbal behaviors accompanying lie-telling behavior are different when a collective interview is carried out in a spontaneous deceptive context as opposed to planned deceptive contexts.

This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences affect semantic prediction. We assessed this by looking at two languages, Dutch and Turkish, that differ in word order and thus vary in how words come together to create sentence meaning. In an eye-tracking task, Dutch and Turkish four-year-olds (N= 40), five-year-olds (N= 58), and adults (N= 40) were presented with a visual display containing two familiar objects (e.g., a cake and a tree). Participants heard semantically constraining (e.g., “The boy eats the big cake”) or neutral sentences (e.g., “The boy sees the big cake”) in their native language. The Dutch data revealed a prediction effect for children and adults; however, it was larger for the adults. The Turkish data revealed no prediction effect for the children but only for the adults. These findings reveal that experience with word order structures and/or automatization of language processing routines may lead to timecourse differences in semantic prediction.

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.

Kuntay, Aylin/0000-0001-9057-7556 WOS:000417473000006 PubMed: 28606193 This paper examines the way children younger than two use non-verbal devices (i.e., deictic gestures and communicative functional acts) and pay attention to discourse status (i.e., prior mention vs. newness) of referents in interactions with caregivers. Data based on semi-naturalistic interactions with caregivers of four children, at ages 1;00, 1;05, and 1;09, are analyzed. We report that children employ different types of non-verbal devices to supplement their inadequate referential forms before gaining mastery in language. By age 1;09, children show sensitivity to discourse status by using deictic gestures to accompany their non-lexical forms for new referents. A comparison of children's patterns with those in the input they receive reveals that caregivers choose their referential forms in accordance with discourse status information and tend to use different types of non-verbal devices to accompany their lexical and non-lexical referential forms. These results show that non-verbal devices play an important role in early referential discourse. TUBATurkish Academy of SciencesEuropean Commission; Eurocores, ESF This research is the part of the Koc University Longitudinal Language Development Database (KULLDD) developed at the Language and Communication Development Lab at Koc University (Kuntay, Kocbas, & Tasci) and funded by TUBA and Eurocores, ESF. The database in the present paper is now part of the 'ACQDIV Corpus' (2016, ). We would like to thank Dilara Kocbas and Engin Arik for coordinating the corpus project; Vasfiye Geckin for editing the manuscript; Asli Ozden, Ayca Bilmez, and Ozan Kuru for transcribing our dataset; and Ezgi Aydogdu for assisting in the coding of our dataset. We also warmly thank the families and their children who took part in the corpus project for their contribution to the development of the corpus data.

This study explores children’s perception of social robots as a source of information across different domains of knowledge. Three- to 6-year-old children (N = 80) chose between a robot and either a cartoon character or an adult to learn new information in five different domains. Regardless of the opponent, children preferred to ask questions to the robot most about machines, and least about biology and psychology. In all domains, children’s judgments of robots as animate beings affected their preferences. Specifically, the more perceptual abilities children attributed to robots, the more they were likely to choose the robot over the adult to learn new information. Our findings suggest that children’s perception of social robots as knowledgeable informants depends on the subject and their animacy attribution to robots.

It has been suggested that some individuals may benefit more from social robots than do others. Using second language (L2) as an example, the present study examined how individual differences in attitudes toward robots and personality traits may be related to learning outcomes. Preliminary results with 24 Turkish-speaking adults suggest that negative attitudes toward robots, more specifically thoughts and anxiety about the negative social impact that robots may have on the society, predicted how well adults learned L2 words from a social robot. The possible implications of the findings as well as future directions are also discussed.

To what extent are links between musical pitch and space universal, and to what extent are they shaped by language? There is contradictory evidence in support of both universality and linguistic relativity presently, leaving the question open. To address this, speakers of Dutch who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height and speakers of Turkish who use a thickness metaphor were tested in simple nonlinguistic space-pitch association tasks. Both groups showed evidence of a thickness-pitch association, but differed significantly in their height-pitch associations, suggesting the latter may be more susceptible to language. When participants had to match pitches to spatial stimuli where height and thickness were opposed (i.e., a thick line high in space vs. a thin line low in space), Dutch and Turkish differed in their relative preferences. Whereas Turkish participants predominantly opted for a thickness-pitch interpretation-even if this meant a reversal of height-pitch mappings-Dutch participants favored a height-pitch interpretation more often. These findings provide new evidence that speakers of different languages vary in their space-pitch associations, while at the same time showing such associations are not equally susceptible to linguistic influences. Some space-pitch (i.e., height-pitch) associations are more malleable than others (i.e., thickness-pitch).

Highlights • Data from typologically diverse languages shows common distributional patterns. • Discontinuous repetitive patterns in the input provide cues for category assignment. • Morphological frames accurately predict nouns and verbs in the input to children., How does a child map words to grammatical categories when words are not overtly marked either lexically or prosodically? Recent language acquisition theories have proposed that distributional information encoded in sequences of words or morphemes might play a central role in forming grammatical classes. To test this proposal, we analyze child-directed speech from seven typologically diverse languages to simulate maximum variation in the structures of the world’s languages. We ask whether the input to children contains cues for assigning syntactic categories in frequent frames, which are frequently occurring nonadjacent sequences of words or morphemes. In accord with aggregated results from previous studies on individual languages, we find that frequent word frames do not provide a robust distributional pattern for accurately predicting grammatical categories. However, our results show that frames are extremely accurate cues cross-linguistically at the morpheme level. We theorize that the nonadjacent dependency pattern captured by frequent frames is a universal anchor point for learners on the morphological level to detect and categorize grammatical categories. Whether frames also play a role on higher linguistic levels such as words is determined by grammatical features of the individual language.

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 −mIş 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.

Infants’ pointing frequency is a predictor of their later language abilities. Yet, predictors of pointing frequency in the first year of life are not well understood. Study 1 explored what factors in infants and caregivers at 10 months would predict the pointing frequency of infants at 12 months (N = 35). Infant‐driven predictors were infants’ fine‐motor skills and point‐following abilities. Caregiver‐mediated predictors were caregivers’ pointing frequency and responsiveness toward infants’ pointing. Relevant caregiver responsiveness at 10 months predicted infants’ pointing frequency at 12 months, controlling for the other factors and infants’ prior pointing frequency. Study 2 explored whether child‐level factors influence caregivers’ responsiveness (N = 49). We examined the hand shape of infants’ pointing (whole‐hand versus index‐finger) and the presence of point‐accompanying vocalizations. Infants’ vocalization‐accompanied points were more likely to elicit relevant responses from caregivers, while hand shapes played a less pronounced role. Together, the findings reveal an early emerging mutual relationship between infant pointing and caregiver behavior such that certain characteristics of infant pointing predict caregivers’ responsiveness, and relevant responsiveness toward infants’ pointing predicts the increase in infants’ pointing frequencies.

Referential communication is effective when speakers describe a specific entity in a way that leads to accurate identification of that referent among competitors. Young children's initial referential expressions are often inadequate, and this state of miscommunication needs to be repaired in subsequent communicative attempts. Exposure to adults' effective descriptions of referents is beneficial for children to develop referentially clear initial descriptions. Here, we examined whether adult models of speech also provide benefits for children's communicative repair behavior. Furthermore, we assessed the relation between children's cognitive abilities and referential communication skills. We tested 59 children (aged 4 years to 5 years 9 months) on their ability to request specific stickers among similar distractors in a pretest-modeling-posttest design. In the modeling phase, 30 children heard more informative descriptions of stickers with relative clauses (e.g., "you selected the horse that the boy is riding") and 29 children heard less informative descriptions with demonstrative noun phrases (e.g., "you selected that horse"). In a second session, we measured children's short-term memory, executive functions (working memory and cognitive flexibility), and theory of mind. Children who heard more informative expressions showed a greater increase in uniquely identifying initial descriptions than children who heard less informative expressions. Hearing more informative expressions did not provide an additional benefit in repairing ambiguous messages, an ability we found to be related to cognitive flexibility and memory. Results indicate that informative language structures that uniquely identify referents provide limited benefits to children for effective communication where children's short-term memory and executive functions also matter.

The present study examines the linguistic representations of emotion terms in relation to educational attainment and self-construal through a two-part narration task. Eighty Turkish adults recounted four events that they experienced in the last five years of their lives (event-description task) and then described what they felt during these events (emotion-elicited narration task). The results show that higher levels of educational attainment and autonomous-related self-construal predicted higher levels of linguistic abstractness in emotion terms, whereas higher levels of related self-construal predicted lower levels of linguistic abstractness in emotion terms. Comparisons of the level of abstractness of emotion terms in event-descriptions and emotion-elicited narrations indicate that while the linguistic abstractness of emotion terms was similar across the two tasks in the lower-educated group, it increased in the emotion-elicited narration task in the higher-educated group. The role of formal education and self-construal in emotional language use were discussed as sources of within-culture variation.

Although researchers have studied disparities in early language development related to socioeconomic status (SES), it is unclear how early and through which mechanisms these differences emerge. As income inequality continues to widen across the world, it is crucial to examine the child-level mechanisms that mediate the effects of SES on individual differences in language development. A deeper understanding of the nature of the differences will allow development of more effective intervention techniques. In this article, we discuss work on child-level cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the relation between SES and early language development. We discuss possible factors behind individual differences in child-level mechanisms and cascading effects of these differences. We conclude with recommendations for research.

Data from a nationally representative sample from Turkey (N = 1,017) were used to investigate the environmental factors that support the receptive vocabulary of 3-year-old children who differ in their developmental risk due to family low economic status and elevated maternal depressive symptoms. Children's vocabulary knowledge was strongly associated with language stimulation and learning materials in all families regardless of risk status. Maternal warmth and responsiveness supported vocabulary competence in families of low economic status only when maternal depressive symptoms were low. In families with the highest levels of risk, that is, with depression and economic distress jointly present, support by the extended family and neighbors for caring for the child protected children's vocabulary development against these adverse conditions. The empirical evidence on the positive contribution of extrafamilial support to young children's receptive vocabulary under adverse conditions allows an expansion of our current theorizing about influences on language development.

This study examined how Turkish-speaking preschoolers displayed oppositions in their peer interactions through two adversative discourse markers, ya and ki. These two markers differ in their syntactic mobility. The data came from seminaturalistic peer interactions of 78 preschoolers. The discursive properties of children's utterances with ya and ki were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The analyses suggested that due to the differences in their syntactic mobility, these two discourse markers flagged alternative types of oppositions. Ki, the less mobile marker, was more tightly linked to the propositional content and challenged the relevance of the prior utterance, rather than directly disagreeing with it. Such uses minimized opposition. On the other hand, ya, the more mobile marker, was semantically more independent of the proposition to which it was attached and marked opposition at a more global level. Ya-utterances were mostly in the form of counters, such as ‘Ya stop!’ – ‘Ya stop!’, which es...

On account of both their functional and their morphosyntactic characteristics, relative clauses are often viewed as indicators of complexity in child language. Morphosyntactic properties of Turkish make use of particularly arduous relative clauses in spontaneous early discourse. A matching sticker selection task was used to determine whether Turkish-learning 3- and 4-year-olds can be trained to use subject relative clauses and uniquely identifying constructions. Upon their selection of the accurate sticker, the children were exposed to relative clause constructions (relative clause condition), sentences with demonstrative pronouns (demonstrative noun phrase condition), or a general approval (positive feedback condition). The number of relative clauses increased from pretest to posttest only in the relative clause condition; the rate of using adequately discriminating forms increased in all the three conditions, albeit with a steeper increase in the relative clause condition. The results are discussed in the framework of both structural and pragmatic priming.

We compare the processing of transitive sentences in young learners of a strict word order language (English) and two languages that allow noun omissions and many variant word orders: Turkish, a case-marked language, and Mandarin Chinese, a non case-marked language. Children aged 1–3 years listened to simple transitive sentences in the typical word order of their language, paired with two visual scenes, only one of which matched the sentence. Multiple measures of comprehension (percent of looking to match, latency to look to match, number of switches of attention) revealed a general pattern of early sensitivity to word order, coupled with language and age effects in children's processing efficiency. In particular, English learners showed temporally speedier processing of transitive sentences than Turkish learners, who also displayed more uncertainty about the matching scene. Mandarin learners behaved like Turkish learners in showing slower processing of sentences, and all language groups displayed faster processing by older than younger children. These results demonstrate that sentence processing is sensitive to crosslinguistic features beginning early in language development.