Duygu Özge - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Duygu Özge
Cognitive Development, Dec 31, 2023
The present study introduces systematic data on the cognitive and linguistic abilities of refugee... more The present study introduces systematic data on the cognitive and linguistic abilities of refugee children. We tested 9–10 year-old Syrian refugee children (N = 25) on their cognitive abilities (i.e., working memory, shifting, inhibitory control, and fluid intelligence) and vocabulary knowledge in Arabic and Turkish. We compared their performance to two non-refugee control groups with low socioeconomic status, matched on age and mother’s education: Arabic-Turkish bilinguals (N = 29) and Turkish monolinguals (N = 19). Refugee children lagged behind both non-refugee groups in the fluid intelligence task. Compared to their bilingual peers, they showed poorer performance in working memory and shifting tasks. On the other hand, these scores matched their monolingual peers, with only slower performance in the shifting task. Greater exposure to trauma and poverty were predictors for lower scores in refugee children’s cognitive tasks. On the language tests, refugee children exhibited a smaller Turkish vocabulary size compared to both non-refugee controls. Trauma exposure, poverty and kindergarten attendance factors were significant predictors for this difference. As for the Arabic language skills, Syrian children outperformed their bilingual peers in Arabic. Although Syrian children displayed a more balanced bilingual profile, their performance in their dominant language (Arabic) was poorer than the bilingual control group’s performance in their dominant language (Turkish). Overall, the results suggest that refugee children’s working memory, shifting and fluid intelligence abilities, as well as mother tongue development, were negatively affected by forced displacement, but they were able to develop Turkish vocabulary skills and match Turkish monolinguals on both working memory and shifting abilities. This is the first piece of evidence suggesting that while being a refugee has adverse effects on children’s cognitive and linguistic development, holding bilingual status may actually create a protective shield in some cognitive abilities for disadvantaged refugee children.
East European Journal of Psycholinguistics
War trauma is often accompanied by poor living conditions in the new environment in a manner pres... more War trauma is often accompanied by poor living conditions in the new environment in a manner preserving or even deteriorating the negative influences of war. Several researchers have investigated the refugee experiences of displaced children. Often they have focused on the detrimental effects of war on psychological well-being, mental health, educational settings, social adaptation, quality of nutrition, financial difficulties, safety and language learning experiences. Each of these effects has been proven to negatively affect cognitive abilities; however, the current study reviews the key studies to reveal the cognitive and linguistic outcomes of holding refugee status in the early childhood period. Doing this, we aim to reveal the adverse conditions that affect refugee children’s three core abilities of executive functions, namely working memory, inhibitory control and shifting. In addition to cognitive outcomes, we present the factors that may affect these children’s mother tongu...
The study combines offline techniques with online reaction-time experiments, for the first time in ... more The study combines offline techniques with online reaction-time experiments, for the first time in testing monolingual Turkish children, in order to compare the mechanisms and strategies employed by adults and children of a head-final language with rich inflection and variable word order. In addition, the study presents two off-line experiments investigating the comprehension and production strategies employed by Turkish-English bilingual children and Turkish monolingual children at the ages of 5-8. A series of experiments in this study confirmed that the subject-object asymmetry that has been reported in several other languages, as well as in Turkish, has also been observed in Turkish speaking monolingual and bilingual children in terms of their comprehension and production of Turkish relative clauses. In all of the experiments, both monolingual and bilingual children showed a better performance in subject RCs compared to object RCs. Moreover, the monolingual children presented a very s...
Turkish "unless" is not biconditional unless the pragmatic context allows it Hearing the utteranc... more Turkish "unless" is not biconditional unless the pragmatic context allows it Hearing the utterance Unless you press the button, the alarm will not stop, one would infer that (i) the alarm should stop upon a button-press, and that (ii) somebody must have pressed the button upon hearing the alarm stopping. This pattern of reasoning demonstrates that the connective unless receives a biconditional interpretation in this example. It has long been suspected that biconditionality of unless is not a lexically given semantic absolute, but a function of the broader syntactic/semantic organization of the hosting sentence. Particularly, while unless gets a biconditional interpretation in positive quantificational contexts (PQC) (e.g., every), it gets a uniconditional reading in negative quantificational contexts (NQC) (e.g., no). [1, 2] Yet, exceptive accounts take unless to be biconditional in all contexts. [3] To our knowledge, there exists no consensus on either the descriptive facts about unless or how to model its meaning. [4] We aim to contribute to this research with two experiments on the semantics of Turkish unless. Exp-1 explores the effect of pragmatic context on the interpretation of unless and Exp-2 investigates its interaction with quantifiers.
Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi
Light verb constructions (e.g., give a kiss to somebody) syntactically reflect typical ditransiti... more Light verb constructions (e.g., give a kiss to somebody) syntactically reflect typical ditransitive structures (e.g., give a violin to somebody) yet it is not clear whether these two structures thematically similar as well. We tested Turkish-speaking adults on their construal of light verb constructions with respect to the number of thematic roles they perceive in the event structure in a rating study. The light verb give with a different noun phrase was used in all critical utterances (e.g., give a response or give an assignment). The noun phrases of these constructions denominalized either by -lA or -lAn+dIr morpheme (e.g., response-lA and assignment-lAn+dIr) were also used as control items. The study concluded that the light verbs with their noun phrase complements contribute to the semantic construal of the event structure and the thematic role assignment processes for the denominalized versions of these structures reflect this meaning construal.
Cognitive Development, Dec 31, 2023
The present study introduces systematic data on the cognitive and linguistic abilities of refugee... more The present study introduces systematic data on the cognitive and linguistic abilities of refugee children. We tested 9–10 year-old Syrian refugee children (N = 25) on their cognitive abilities (i.e., working memory, shifting, inhibitory control, and fluid intelligence) and vocabulary knowledge in Arabic and Turkish. We compared their performance to two non-refugee control groups with low socioeconomic status, matched on age and mother’s education: Arabic-Turkish bilinguals (N = 29) and Turkish monolinguals (N = 19). Refugee children lagged behind both non-refugee groups in the fluid intelligence task. Compared to their bilingual peers, they showed poorer performance in working memory and shifting tasks. On the other hand, these scores matched their monolingual peers, with only slower performance in the shifting task. Greater exposure to trauma and poverty were predictors for lower scores in refugee children’s cognitive tasks. On the language tests, refugee children exhibited a smaller Turkish vocabulary size compared to both non-refugee controls. Trauma exposure, poverty and kindergarten attendance factors were significant predictors for this difference. As for the Arabic language skills, Syrian children outperformed their bilingual peers in Arabic. Although Syrian children displayed a more balanced bilingual profile, their performance in their dominant language (Arabic) was poorer than the bilingual control group’s performance in their dominant language (Turkish). Overall, the results suggest that refugee children’s working memory, shifting and fluid intelligence abilities, as well as mother tongue development, were negatively affected by forced displacement, but they were able to develop Turkish vocabulary skills and match Turkish monolinguals on both working memory and shifting abilities. This is the first piece of evidence suggesting that while being a refugee has adverse effects on children’s cognitive and linguistic development, holding bilingual status may actually create a protective shield in some cognitive abilities for disadvantaged refugee children.
East European Journal of Psycholinguistics
War trauma is often accompanied by poor living conditions in the new environment in a manner pres... more War trauma is often accompanied by poor living conditions in the new environment in a manner preserving or even deteriorating the negative influences of war. Several researchers have investigated the refugee experiences of displaced children. Often they have focused on the detrimental effects of war on psychological well-being, mental health, educational settings, social adaptation, quality of nutrition, financial difficulties, safety and language learning experiences. Each of these effects has been proven to negatively affect cognitive abilities; however, the current study reviews the key studies to reveal the cognitive and linguistic outcomes of holding refugee status in the early childhood period. Doing this, we aim to reveal the adverse conditions that affect refugee children’s three core abilities of executive functions, namely working memory, inhibitory control and shifting. In addition to cognitive outcomes, we present the factors that may affect these children’s mother tongu...
The study combines offline techniques with online reaction-time experiments, for the first time in ... more The study combines offline techniques with online reaction-time experiments, for the first time in testing monolingual Turkish children, in order to compare the mechanisms and strategies employed by adults and children of a head-final language with rich inflection and variable word order. In addition, the study presents two off-line experiments investigating the comprehension and production strategies employed by Turkish-English bilingual children and Turkish monolingual children at the ages of 5-8. A series of experiments in this study confirmed that the subject-object asymmetry that has been reported in several other languages, as well as in Turkish, has also been observed in Turkish speaking monolingual and bilingual children in terms of their comprehension and production of Turkish relative clauses. In all of the experiments, both monolingual and bilingual children showed a better performance in subject RCs compared to object RCs. Moreover, the monolingual children presented a very s...
Turkish "unless" is not biconditional unless the pragmatic context allows it Hearing the utteranc... more Turkish "unless" is not biconditional unless the pragmatic context allows it Hearing the utterance Unless you press the button, the alarm will not stop, one would infer that (i) the alarm should stop upon a button-press, and that (ii) somebody must have pressed the button upon hearing the alarm stopping. This pattern of reasoning demonstrates that the connective unless receives a biconditional interpretation in this example. It has long been suspected that biconditionality of unless is not a lexically given semantic absolute, but a function of the broader syntactic/semantic organization of the hosting sentence. Particularly, while unless gets a biconditional interpretation in positive quantificational contexts (PQC) (e.g., every), it gets a uniconditional reading in negative quantificational contexts (NQC) (e.g., no). [1, 2] Yet, exceptive accounts take unless to be biconditional in all contexts. [3] To our knowledge, there exists no consensus on either the descriptive facts about unless or how to model its meaning. [4] We aim to contribute to this research with two experiments on the semantics of Turkish unless. Exp-1 explores the effect of pragmatic context on the interpretation of unless and Exp-2 investigates its interaction with quantifiers.
Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi
Light verb constructions (e.g., give a kiss to somebody) syntactically reflect typical ditransiti... more Light verb constructions (e.g., give a kiss to somebody) syntactically reflect typical ditransitive structures (e.g., give a violin to somebody) yet it is not clear whether these two structures thematically similar as well. We tested Turkish-speaking adults on their construal of light verb constructions with respect to the number of thematic roles they perceive in the event structure in a rating study. The light verb give with a different noun phrase was used in all critical utterances (e.g., give a response or give an assignment). The noun phrases of these constructions denominalized either by -lA or -lAn+dIr morpheme (e.g., response-lA and assignment-lAn+dIr) were also used as control items. The study concluded that the light verbs with their noun phrase complements contribute to the semantic construal of the event structure and the thematic role assignment processes for the denominalized versions of these structures reflect this meaning construal.