Gelişimde eylemi gerçekleştiren katılımcı tercihi: Canlılık ve olay yapısının rolü

According to linguistic theory, thematic roles in language are hierarchically organized in terms of their salience and this hierarchy is rooted in their counterparts as event participants in cognition. Here, we seek developmental evidence for this proposal in Turkish-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds. We examine whether children show a preference for Agents over Patients in two-participant causative events, such as a woman tickling a man. To examine whether Patient animacy has an effect on this preference, we prepared images depicting events in which the Patient was either a human or an inanimate object. Modified versions of these depictions were created by applying a color change to either the Agent or the Patient. Our stimuli also included back-to-back depictions that disrupted the event structure while keeping other visual features constant. In an eye-tracked change detection task, participants viewed causative event depictions flickering between original and modified images, with color changes applied to either the Agent or the Patient. We measured change detection accuracy and proportion of fixations to the changing role. Our findings revealed an asymmetry between Agents and Patients only in face-to-face events with an inanimate Patient: participants were less likely to detect changes in and they looked more towards the Patient compared to the Agent. Looking more toward an entity might indicate increased cognitive effort to detect the change because the entity is less salient. No differences were observed in face-to-face events with an animate Patient or back-to-back events. These findings suggest an interplay of event roles and animacy in Agent preference and support the generalizability of the phenomenon.