Event Representation in Cognition, Language and Development

"One of the fundamental aspects of human cognition is the ability to perceive and communicate about dynamic events that unfold around us. Current research assumes that event perception is guided by general cognitive biases that are universal to a large extent. Nevertheless, evidence for this claim mainly comes from research with speakers of English that overlooks the cross-linguistic diversity in how core aspects of events are encoded. This project studies two core event domains (event participants and spatial-temporal framework) using a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic measures with both learners and mature speakers of Turkish - a language that encodes these aspects of events differently. By doing so, this project will combine theories and methods from cognitive science, developmental psychology and linguistics to enhance our understanding of the nature of language-thought interactions in event cognition and how it changes during development. "