Peer-reviewed article
Processing canonical and non-canonical word orders in Turkish: behavioral and ERP evidence from adults and children
Medine Dudu, Yağmur Köyel Yıldırım, Talat Bulut ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This peer-reviewed study looked at how adults (67 people) and children (37 children aged 4.3 to 9.7 years) understand Turkish sentences with a typical word order (subject-object-verb) and a less typical order (object-subject-verb). Both groups were less accurate on the less typical order, and the gap was larger in children. Adults showed a late brain-wave response to the less typical order, while children showed no reliable response after statistical correction. The study is about language processing, not about children's well-being, health, protection or rights.
Key points
- Accuracy was lower for object-subject-verb than subject-object-verb sentences in both adults and children.
- The accuracy gap between the two sentence types was significantly larger in children.
- Adults showed a late posterior positivity to the non-canonical order in the 600-1,200 ms window; children showed no reliable effect after correction.
- Age was not reliably linked to the behavioral or brain-response differences within children.
- Stronger grammatical ability predicted higher comprehension accuracy in children beyond age.
Limitations
The study is a basic language-processing experiment with a small child sample, and it does not address children's well-being or evaluate any intervention. The group differences in brain responses were not statistically supported after correction, so conclusions about development are tentative.
Abstract
Introduction Turkish permits grammatical non-canonical word order while morphological case marking disambiguates thematic roles. Methods We examined comprehension accuracy and verb-locked event-related potentials (ERPs) to Turkish canonical subject-object-verb (SOV) and non-canonical object-subject-verb (OSV) sentences in adults ( n = 67; 18–44 years) and children ( n = 37; 4.3–9.7 years). Results Accuracy was lower for OSV than SOV in both groups, with a significantly larger SOV-OSV accuracy difference in children. Adults showed a late posterior OSV > SOV positivity, with significant effects in several prespecified windows within the 600–1,200-ms interval, consistent with increased sentence-final processing demands associated with the non-canonical configuration at the final verb. Children showed no reliable corresponding positivity after correction for multiple comparisons. Critically, however, Group × Sentence Type interactions did not survive correction, providing insufficient evidence that the magnitude of the SOV-OSV ERP effect differed between adults and children. Within children, chronological age showed no reliable linear or quadratic association with the behavioral or ERP SOV-OSV difference across the sampled age range. By contrast, stronger grammatical ability predicted higher comprehension accuracy in both sentence types beyond age; the same general pattern was obtained for broader language ability. Neither grammatical nor broader language ability reliably modulated the SOV-OSV ERP difference. Discussion Overall, the findings suggest that the availability of morphosyntactic case cues does not by itself entail adult-like efficiency in integrating those cues during sentence comprehension, and that developmental patterns may be expressed differently across behavioral and electrophysiological measures.