Dil ve bilişte olay temsilinin gelişimi: Türkçe konuşan çocuklardan örnekler

During language development, children need to make sense of a continuous stream of input into meaningful segments, known as events, and communicate about them. Here, we examine how preschoolers (4- and 5-year-olds) and adults segment events in language and cognition in the domain of motion events, focusing on Turkish, a verb-framed language that segments motion paths in separate verb phrases. In the non-linguistic Dwell Time task, participants viewed self-paced slideshows created with frames taken from videos of motion events that either involved a path change or did not involve a path change. Detection of an event unit is indicated by event boundaries, where the time spent looking at a slide is significantly longer compared to other slides. In the linguistic task, the same participants described the same events to a confederate addressee. Our findings revealed that participants described motion events that involve a path change with two or more path verbs more frequently than events that do not. We observed a developmental pattern in the linguistic descriptions: adults tended to use multiple verb phrases more frequently than younger children and older children tended to use them more frequently than their younger counterparts. This tendency was particularly evident in using two or more path verbs. However, despite the differences in linguistic descriptions, children and adults segmented the events similarly in the non-linguistic task. These findings suggest a lack of homology between cognitive and linguistic event segmentation throughout development.