TURead: An eye movement dataset of Turkish reading.

In this study, we present TURead, an eye movement dataset of silent and oral sentence reading in Turkish, an agglutinative language with a shallow orthography understudied in reading research. TURead provides empirical data to investigate the relationship between morphology and oculomotor control. We employ a target-word approach in which target words are manipulated by word length and by the addition of two commonly used suffixes in Turkish. The dataset contains well-established eye movement variables; prelexical characteristics such as vowel harmony and bigram-trigram frequencies and word features, such as word length, predictability, frequency, eye voice span measures, Cloze test scores of the root word and suffix predictabilities, as well as the scores obtained from two working memory tests. Our findings on fixation parameters and word characteristics are in line with the patterns reported in the relevant literature.

The Multilingual Picture Database.

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research. In this paper we present the Multilingual Picture (Multipic) database, containing naming norms and familiarity scores for 500 coloured pictures, in thirty-two languages or language varieties from around the world. The data was validated with standard methods that have been used for existing picture datasets. This is the first dataset to provide naming norms, and translation equivalents, for such a variety of languages; as such, it will be of particular value to psycholinguists and other interested researchers. The dataset has been made freely available.

Eye movement control in Turkish sentence reading.

Reading requires the assembly of cognitive processes across a wide spectrum from low-level visual perception to high-level discourse comprehension. One approach of unravelling the dynamics associated with these processes is to determine how eye movements are influenced by the characteristics of the text, in particular which features of the words within the perceptual span maximise the information intake due to foveal, spillover, parafoveal, and predictive processing. One way to test the generalisability of current proposals of such distributed processing is to examine them across different languages. For Turkish, an agglutinative language with a shallow orthography-phonology mapping, we replicate the well-known canonical main effects of frequency and predictability of the fixated word as well as effects of incoming saccade amplitude and fixation location within the word on single-fixation durations with data from 35 adults reading 120 nine-word sentences. Evidence for previously reported effects of the characteristics of neighbouring words and interactions was mixed. There was no evidence for the expected Turkish-specific morphological effect of the number of inflectional suffixes on single-fixation durations. To control for word-selection bias associated with single-fixation durations, we also tested effects on word skipping, single-fixation, and multiple-fixation cases with a base-line category logit model, assuming an increase of difficulty for an increase in the number of fixations. With this model, significant effects of word characteristics and number of inflectional suffixes of foveal word on probabilities of the number of fixations were observed, while the effects of the characteristics of neighbouring words and interactions were mixed.

Investigation of the Processing of Noun and Verb Words with fMRI in Patients with Schizophrenia.

INTRODUCTION: Action naming is reported to be more damaged in patients with schizophrenia than object naming. Aim of this study is to understand the cortical mechanism underlying the negative symptoms seen in patients with schizophrenia such as inactivity, restricted behavioral repertoire, by using functional MRI (fMRI) to determine whether the action origin words have a different representation in the brain regions of patients with schizophrenia and healthy individuals. Our hypothesis is that restriction in the repertoire of movement and behavior and the failure of words of "action" than words of "object" are interrelated through the same cortical mechanisms. If this hypothesis is correct, the reason for not taking action in patients with schizophrenia may be improper definition of the action (verb). METHODS: fMRI study was conducted with 12 patients with schizophrenia and 12 healthy individuals. fMRI recording was performed after applying positive and negative syndrome (PANSS) scale, Calgary depression scale, hand preference scale to the participants. During the sessions, "lexical decision task" is applied by showing a total of 240 words (120 words - 60 verbs (words of action) and 60 nouns (words of object) - and 120 non-words) to the subjects. RESULTS: In fMRI findings, in the group main effect, which can also be expressed as the difference of the noun and verb words in the group of schizophrenia from the noun and verb words in the healthy control group, the activation of the anterior prefrontal cortex is found to be lower in patients with schizophrenia than in healthy individuals. When the brain areas which show the difference in verb words in schizophrenia group from both noun words in schizophrenia group and noun and verb words in healthy individuals are examined, inferior frontal gyrus pars triangularis (BA45) showed more activation in patients with schizophrenia than healthy individuals, but again for the same task, inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis (BA44) and left primary sensory area showed less activation in patients with schizophrenia than healthy individuals. There is no difference between patients with schizophrenia and healthy volunteers in terms of correctly identified words and reaction time. CONCLUSION: Considering the lack of difference between the groups in terms of number of correctly identified words and reaction time, and BA 44's role in recognition and imitation of action and being a part of the mirror neuron system, the significant inverse correlation between PANSS negative score and BA40 can be seen as an effort to compensate for BA44 inadequate activity through BA40.

The Interaction of Contextual and Syntactic Information in the Processing of Turkish Anaphors.

In contrast with languages where anaphors can be classified into pronouns and reflexives, Turkish has a tripartite system that consists of the anaphors o, kendi, and kendisi. The syntactic literature on these anaphors has proposed that whereas o behaves like a pronoun and kendi behaves like a reflexive, kendisi has a more flexible behavior and it can function as both a pronoun and a reflexive. Using acceptability judgments and a self-paced reading task, we examined how Turkish anaphors are processed in isolated sentences and within larger discourse contexts. We manipulated contextual information by creating passages where the context favored a local, long-distance or extra-sentential referent prior to the appearance of the anaphor. We measured the effect of the context on participants' reading times and their end-of-trial coreference assignments. Our results suggest that contextual information affects the interpretive possibilities associated with an anaphor, but that the influence of context depends on the degree to which the anaphor is syntactically constrained.