Language Development
In this line of work, we aim to understand the mechanisms that underlie children’s ability to learn the words and the structures of their native language and how their ability to do so is linked to their cognitive development.
Part of our research in this area focuses on the domain of evidentiality – how speakers convey to their listeners how they learned about a piece of information. There is a lot of cross-linguistic variability in this domain. For example, Turkish speakers must convey this information as part of their grammar, but English speakers do not have to. Our work with young Turkish learners has shown that the acquisition of these linguistic categories is challenging for children and this challenge at least partially depends on the ability to make the same distinctions non-linguistically.
Our other work in this line focuses on the domain of events. When communicating about events, we need to make choices about what information to include. We are interested in understanding how these choices are guided by the structure of the event itself vs. the structure of language the speaker is using. Our cross-linguistic work has demonstrated an interplay between conceptual and linguistic factors in guiding children’s (and adults) communication about events.
Representative publications
- Ünal, E., & Papafragou, A. (2016). Production-comprehension asymmetries and the acquisition of evidential morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 89, 179-199. doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.12.001
- Ünal, E., Richards, C., Trueswell, J., & Papafragou, A. (2021). Representing agents, patients, goals and instruments in causative events: A cross‐linguistic investigation of early language and cognition. Developmental Science. doi.org/10.1111/desc.13116
Language and Thought
Languages vary considerably in how they encode different aspects of the world. In this line of work, we ask whether this cross-linguistic diversity is linked to variation in other aspects of cognition.
Our work has shown striking similarities in how child and adult speakers of different languages perform in cognitive tasks that do not involve language. Importantly, these similarities are observed despite strong cross-linguistic differences in how people talk about the same categories.
Part of our work in this area adopts a multimodal approach to understand the interplay between language, gesture and cognition. Here we use a combination of eye-tracking methodologies, language production tasks and other behavioral measures (e.g., memory paradigms). This work has shown an online influence of language on cognition limited to cases where speakers actively use language while performing a cognitive task. For example, speakers direct their attention to the aspects of events they communicate about in both speech and gesture. This suggests that language can temporarily interacts with cognitive processes without altering cognition in a deep and permanent way.
Representative publications
- Ünal, E., & Papafragou, A. (2016). Interactions between language and mental representations. Language Learning, 66, 554-580. doi.org/10.1111/lang.12188
- Ünal, E., Pinto, A., Bunger, A. & Papafragou, A. (2016). Monitoring sources of event memories: A cross-linguistic investigation. Journal of Memory and Language, 87, 157-176. doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.10.009
- Ünal, E., Manhardt, F., & Özyürek, A. (2022). Speaking and gesturing guide event perception during message conceptualization: Evidence from eye movements. Cognition, 225, Article 105127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105127