Publications

Abstract

Children vary in mathematical skills even before formal schooling. The current study investigated how parental math beliefs, parents’ math anxiety, and children's spontaneous gestures contribute to preschool-aged children’s math performance. Sixty-three Turkish-reared children (33 girls, Mage = 49.9 months, SD = 3.68) were assessed on verbal counting, cardinality, and arithmetic tasks (nonverbal and verbal). Results showed that parental math beliefs were related to children’s verbal counting, cardinality and arithmetic scores. Children whose parents have higher math beliefs along with low math anxiety scored highest in the cardinality task. Children’s gesture use was also related to lower cardinality performance and the relation between parental math beliefs and children’s performance became stronger when child gestures were absent. These findings highlight the importance of parent and child-related contributors in explaining the variability in preschool-aged children’s math skills.

Abstract

Prosody underpins various linguistic domains ranging from semantics and syntax to discourse. For instance, prosodic information in the form of lexical stress modifies meanings and, as such, syntactic contexts of words as in Turkish kaz-má "pickaxe" (noun) versus káz-ma "do not dig" (imperative). Likewise, prosody indicates the focused constituent of an utterance as the noun phrase filling the wh-spot in a dialogue like What did you eat? I ate----. In the present study, we investigated the relevance of such prosodic variations for discourse comprehension in Turkish. We aimed at answering how lexical stress and prosodic focus mismatches on critical noun phrases-resulting in grammatical anomalies involving both semantics and syntax and discourse-level anomalies, respectively-affect the perceived correctness of an answer to a question in a given context. To that end, 80 native speakers of Turkish, 40 participating in a psychometric experiment and 40 participating in an EEG experiment, were asked to judge the acceptability of prosodic mismatches that occur either separately or concurrently. Psychometric results indicated that lexical stress mismatch led to a lower correctness score than prosodic focus mismatch, and combined mismatch received the lowest score. Consistent with the psychometric data, EEG results revealed an N400 effect to combined mismatch, and this effect was followed by a P600 response to lexical stress mismatch. Conjointly, these results suggest that every source of prosodic information is immediately available and codetermines the interpretation of an utterance; however, semantically and syntactically relevant lexical stress information is assigned more significance by the language comprehension system compared with prosodic focus information.