Show/Hide Menu
Hide/Show Apps
Logout
Türkçe
Türkçe
Search
Search
Login
Login
OpenMETU
OpenMETU
About
About
Open Science Policy
Open Science Policy
Communities & Collections
Communities & Collections
Help
Help
Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Guides
Guides
Thesis submission
Thesis submission
MS without thesis term project submission
MS without thesis term project submission
Publication submission with DOI
Publication submission with DOI
Publication submission
Publication submission
Supporting Information
Supporting Information
General Information
General Information
Copyright, Embargo and License
Copyright, Embargo and License
Contact us
Contact us
The Development of narrative skills in Turkish-speaking children: a complexity approach
Download
index.pdf
Date
2015
Author
Ögel Balaban, Hale
Metadata
Show full item record
Item Usage Stats
223
views
187
downloads
Cite This
Narrative is a complex form of discourse. Creating it requires “a joint process of event comprehension and language production” (Trabasso & Rodkin, 1994, p.87), and understanding and explaining behaviors and emotions of others through perspective taking. In the present study, it is claimed that these requirements map into three levels of complexity: 1) Plot complexity reflecting the temporal and thematic organization of the narrative in a coherent manner, 2) Evaluative complexity indicating the narrator’s perspective toward the events, and 3) Syntactic complexity expressing the coherent causal, temporal and logical order of the reported events in a cohesive way. The aim of the present study was to examine the developments at each level and their interrelationships. Moreover, the relationship between each level of complexity, and theory of mind (ToM), executive function and the comprehension of complex syntactic structures to each level was analyzed. One hundred and five Turkish-speaking children distributed across 4 age groups (4, 5,7 and 8, and 10 and 11 years) and 15 adults participated in 1. Elicitation of narratives task , 2. Emotional Stroop Task, 3. First- (for 4-year-old children) and second-order (for older children and adults) ToM tasks, 4. Real-apparent emotion task (for 4-year-old children), and 5. Comprehension of complement clauses task. Children’s performance on tasks assessing ToM, executive function and comprehension of complex syntax was found to increase with age. Regarding plot complexity, an increase with age was also observed. The fifth and seventh years of life were found to be transitional periods for the generation of coherent narratives. Moroever, the ability to comprehend complex syntax predicted plot complexity suggesting the influence of general linguistic competence on narrative skills. Children in all age groups were found to employ evaluative devices to some extent. However, the frequency of particular evaluative devices changed with age and even adults were found to use them to a low extent. Executive function was found to predict the extent of the use of syntactically complex clauses. A more detailed analysis of these clauses demonstrated that with age children can incorporate syntactically more complex structures expressing cognitively more complex relations into their narratives. The only significant relation between the three levels of complexity was shown between evaluative and syntactic complexity which had clear indicators in narratives. These findings were discussed considering the cognitive, linguistic and sociocultural nature of narration, and the effect of context on narrative performance.
Subject Keywords
Discourse analysis, Narrative.
,
Narration (Rhetoric).
,
Turkish language.
,
Cognition in children.
,
Child development.
URI
http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12619658/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/25412
Collections
Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis
Suggestions
OpenMETU
Core
Automatic sense prediction of explicit discourse connectives in Turkish with the help of centering theory and morphosyntactic features
Çetin, Savaş; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2018)
Discourse connectives (and, but, however) are one of many means of keeping the discourse coherent. Discourse connectives are classified into groups based on their senses (expansion, contingency, etc.). They describe the semantic relationship of two discourse units. This study aims to build a machine learning system to predict the sense of explicit discourse connectives on the Turkish Discourse Bank data, which is manually gold-annotated. To do so, this study examines the effect of several features: i.e. tra...
Automatic sense prediction of implicit discourse relations in Turkish
Kurfalı, Murathan; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2016)
In discourse parsing, the sense prediction of the Implicit discourse relations poses the most significant challenge. The thesis aims to develop a supervised system to predict the sense of implicit discourse relations in Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB). In order to accomplish that goal, the discourse level annotations obtained from TDB are used. TDB follows the PDTB-2’s sense hierarchy and for all experiments within the current study, only CLASS senses are considered. As the primary experiment, the classifiers ...
A Study on alternative lexicalizations in Turkish discourse bank
Günay, Fikret; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2015)
Discourse relations connect two pieces of discourse and represent a relationship between these two arguments. Discourse relations can be expressed both explicitly and implicitly. The objective of the present thesis is to identify alternative lexicalizations (ALTLEXs) in Turkish (which is a type of implicit relations) in Turkish Discourse Bank, or TDB by means of a corpus-based approach. The thesis contributes to our understanding of Turkish discourse by revealing a set of ALTLEXs. Three methods are employed...
The Role of modifiers in Turkish discourse bank
Çakmak, Deniz Hande; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2015)
This thesis focuses on the role of modifiers used with discourse connectives and investigates modifiers in terms of affecting the modality of the discourse relations. Modifiers are originally adverbs used for different semantic purposes. The already annotated data in Turkish Discourse Bank, or TDB are used for identifying modifiers and classifying them. In the light of previous studies, the discourse connectives occuring with modifiers are analyzed and classified. The semantic distribution of modifiers is d...
A comparative analysis on the use of but, however and although in the university students’ argumentative essays: a corpus-based study on Turkish learners of English and American native speakers
Özhan, Didem; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of English Language Teaching (2012)
Discourse connectives signal discourse coherence by making discourse relations explicit and by playing a role in the organization and structure of information in discourse. Therefore, their use in L2 writing is an important field of study that is likely to have implications for discourse competence both at the sentence-level discourse and at the level of larger discourse structure. The aim of the present study is to account for the use of three contrastive discourse connectives, but, however and although at...
Citation Formats
IEEE
ACM
APA
CHICAGO
MLA
BibTeX
H. Ögel Balaban, “The Development of narrative skills in Turkish-speaking children: a complexity approach,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2015.
