Семинар (на английски език) "From Causal Input to Relational Thinking: Early Acquisition Pathways and Bilingual Influences on Causative Verb Learning"
Корпус 3, РТЦ, етаж 4, зала 400
Организатор:
департамент „Когнитивна наука и психология“
Лектор:
Aslı Aktan-Erciyes (Associate Professor of Psychology at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey)
Модератор:
доц. д-р Пенка Христова
Участници:
преподаватели, студенти и алумни на департамент „Когнитивна наука и психология“
Causal language provides children with a foundational tool for interpreting how events unfold, understanding agency, and reasoning about change. However, the acquisition of causal verbs is shaped by the specific input structures children hear, the contexts in which caregivers communicate with them, and the broader linguistic repertoires that emerge in bilingual settings. This presentation integrates findings from two complementary studies to illuminate these developmental pathways.
The first study is a longitudinal investigation of Turkish-learning monolingual children, examining parental input during free and guided play at 14 and 19 months and children’s causal verb comprehension at 35 months. Parents produced more lexical than morphological causatives overall, yet only morphological causatives in free play predicted later causal verb comprehension. This suggests that children benefit most from structurally transparent causal cues embedded in child-driven, relationally rich contexts that afford opportunities to infer causal structure from interaction rather than instruction.
The second study compares L1-Turkish/L2-English bilingual and L1-Turkish monolingual children (ages 5, 7, and 9) on an experimental
causative verb production task. Results reveal a bilingual advantage: 5-year-old bilinguals outperformed monolinguals specifically in morphological causatives, likely reflecting enhanced awareness arising from navigating structurally distinct causal systems in two languages. Age-related improvements emerged primarily for monolinguals, suggesting divergent developmental trajectories shaped by input distributions and linguistic experience.
Future prospects Together, these studies highlight children build causal representations not only from linguistic forms but from the interactional, social, and cognitive relations in which those forms appear. Thus, relational thought refers to the ability to notice, compare, align, and abstract structural relations across situations and events. Moving forward, I aim to extend this work toward relational thinking frameworks, examining how children integrate causal, temporal, and agentive relations across languages and modalities.
Aslı Aktan-Erciyes is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Kadir Has University, Istanbul. She received her doctoral degree from Boğaziçi University. She did her postdoctoral studies at Koç University in Language and Cognition lab under Dr. Tilbe Göksun's supervision.
Dr. Aktan-Erciyes coordinates SiLab (Studies in Language and Bilingualism), where she conducts research examining the interaction between first and second language with her research team. One line of her research investigates how early and intense exposure to second language affects first language and vice versa. She is also interested in narrative development and motion event conceptualization. She also conducts research on L1 and L2 acquisition, measurement processes and investigate infants with typical and atypical development.