Evidentiality and second-order social cognition

Download
2012
Arslan, Burcu
In this study, the development of a second-order false belief task is investigated by considering the impact of the acquisition of Turkish evidential markers, namely –DI (direct evidence) and –mIş (inference or hearsay). A neutral version of the tasks served as a control form. 21 kindergarten children (aged 4-5 years), 47 primary school children (aged 6- 12 years) and 10 adults participated in the study. Our results revealed that there is no effect of acquisition of evidentials on false belief understanding. Together with the other studies, there is a facilitative effect of –DI (direct evidence) in understanding of stories/narratives in general rather than false belief understanding for the children at the age of 4 to 6/7. In addition to the second-order false belief tasks (FBT_2), a simple working memory task (WST), a complex working memory task (LST), a perspective taking task (PTT) and a double- embedded relative clause task (REL_2) were used in order to investigate the developmental trend of these tasks and their possible relationship with second-order false belief understanding. Also, to the best of our knowledge this is the first time that a REL_2 task has been devised in a Turkish study. The general developmental trend was found for all tasks. Even if some significant correlations were found for FBT_2 score predicted from other tasks, analyses showed that only the contribution of age was significant. Since all of these domains are not related to second-order false belief reasoning but develop at the same time, it is not incompatible with the serial bottleneck hypothesis. In sum, the findings are matching with the modularity view that ToM is a faculty of the human mind at their own pace that does not share intrinsic content with other faculties such as language and working memory (Leslie et al., 2004). However, it develops together with those other faculties and they may constrain the expression of child‟s false belief understanding.

Suggestions

Intonation structure and intonation in Svo and Ovs sentences in spoken Russian
Ghinda, Elena; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2010)
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the difference between SVO and OVS sentences in spoken Russian, which is a language with flexible word order although the basic order is SVO. Two experiments were conducted to understand the nature of intonation. Experiment 1 shows that the Subject appears as kontrast in OVS sentences, and as background in SVO sentences. The F0 curve rises in the Object position when the Subject is kontrast in OVS sentences. The analysis of the results of Experiment 2 shows that the ...
The analysis of contrastive discourse connectives in Turkish
Zeydan, Sultan; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2008)
This thesis is a descriptive study of four contrastive discourse connectives in Turkish. The main aim of this study is to analyze the connectives with respect to their meaning and predicate-argument structure and lay out the similarities and differences among contrastive discourse connectives with the help of quantitative analysis. Although the study is limited with contrastive connectives, it will have implications on how to resolve discourse structure in general and illustrate how lexico-syntactic element...
Language production in a typological perspective: a corpus study of Turkish slips of the tongue
Erişen, İbrahim Özgür; Hohenberger, Annette Edeltraud; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2010)
The main purpose of this study is to establish a Turkish slips of the tongue (SOT) corpus and make typological comparisons with English, French and German corpora. In the first part of the study, a slips of the tongue corpus has been created. 85 podcast recordings were analyzed and 53 SOT errors were found. SOT errors were extracted from the podcasts and these audio clips were combined with their spectrograms in a flash video. Classification of SOT errors were carried out with respect to linguistic units in...
Cognitive development of turkish children on the relation of evidentiality and theory of mind
Özoran, Dinçer; Hohenberger, Annette Edeltraud; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2009)
For the first time a representative Theory of Mind (ToM) scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004) has been cast into three different linguistic forms in order to show the impact of evidential markers on ToM understanding. With Turkish children, we studied (i) a control form without explicit evidential markers, as conducted by Bayramoğlu & Hohenberger (2007), (ii) a verbal form with –DI (marking factuality in the past ) and (iii) a verbal form with –MIS (marking hearsay in the past). To predict ToM performance of childre...
Cognitive aspects of conceptual modeling diagrams : an experimental study
Kılıç, Özkan; Say, Bilge; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2007)
This thesis is about diagrammatic reasoning and error-finding in conceptual modeling diagrams. Specifically, the differences of the cognitive strategies and behaviors of notation-familiar participants versus domain-familiar participants working on conceptual modeling diagrams are inspected. The domain-familiar participants are experienced in the topic being represented, but they do not have any formal training in software development representations. On the other hand, the notation-familiar participants are...
Citation Formats
B. Arslan, “Evidentiality and second-order social cognition,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2012.