The role of verbal and working memory skills in Turkish-speaking children's morphosyntactic prediction

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ÖZKAN GÖKTÜRK D., Küntay A. C., Brouwer S.

Applied Psycholinguistics, cilt.43, sa.6, ss.1305-1328, 2022 (SSCI) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 43 Sayı: 6
  • Basım Tarihi: 2022
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1017/s0142716422000388
  • Dergi Adı: Applied Psycholinguistics
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, Periodicals Index Online, CINAHL, Communication Abstracts, EBSCO Education Source, Educational research abstracts (ERA), Index Islamicus, Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Psycinfo, DIALNET
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1305-1328
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: individual differences, language production, morphosyntactic prediction, predictive processing, visual world paradigm, vocabulary, working memory
  • Marmara Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır

Özet

The current study investigated the contribution of multiple verbal and working memory (WM) skills to morphosyntactic prediction in Turkish-speaking 4- to 8-year-old children. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, 76 children were presented with verb-final sentences with nominative and accusative case markers on the initial noun (e.g., the fast rabbitnominative ... the carrotaccusative eatfuture vs. the fast rabbitaccusative ... the foxnominative eatfuture) while they were looking at a visual display with three objects (e.g., rabbit, carrot, and fox). Importantly, the case markers on the initial noun could be used to predict the second noun in these sentences. The results revealed that when children's early productive vocabulary and language production skills were higher, the better and faster they were in predicting the upcoming noun. The episodic buffer, a component of WM, was also positively associated with children's morphosyntactic prediction abilities. The implications of these results for the mechanisms of linguistic prediction are discussed.