Data for: Why wait for the verb? Turkish speaking children use case markers for incremental language comprehension

The datasets include: (i) the raw gazedata collected by Tobii T60 eye-tracker in the visual-world eye-tracking study by Ozge, Kuntay, and Snedeker (accepted for publication in Cognition) that test the predictive interpretation of case markers by Turkish-speaking children and adults; (ii) the processed version of this data used for various types of analyses, and (iii) the data for the relatedness study, which is the norming study we conducted to test to what extent the topic entity (the first entity) in each item used in the eye-tracking experiment is related to the other entities it appears in each context (i.e., plausible agent and plausible patient). The aim of the visual-world eye-tracking experiment was to see whether children are able to interpret the case marking on the first noun in an utterance to predict the thematic role of the upcoming entity in the utterance before this second entity and the verb appears. In Experiment 1, we used utterances that had a verb-medial order (i.e., Noun1-Verb-Noun2) and we found that while adults were able to use the case marking information prior to the verb information, children were able to do so only after the verb was available. In Experiment 2, we used verb-final utterances (i.e., Noun1-Noun2-Verb) that allowed more time to process the case marking on the first noun and we found that children were similar to adults in using the case marking information to predict the identity of the second noun prior to the second noun and the verb.

本数据集包含以下三部分：(i) 由Tobii T60眼动仪采集的原始眼动数据，该数据来自Ozge、Kuntay与Snedeker开展的视觉世界眼动研究（visual-world eye-tracking study，已被《Cognition》期刊接收待刊），用于测试以土耳其语为母语的儿童与成人对格标记（case markers）的预测性解读能力；(ii) 适用于各类分析的该数据处理后版本；(iii) 相关性研究数据集，即我们开展的常模研究（norming study）所得数据，用于检验眼动实验中每个试次所用材料的话题实体（topic entity，即首个实体），与其在各语境中出现的其他实体（即合理施事与合理受事）之间的关联程度。本视觉世界眼动实验的研究目的为，探究儿童是否能够在第二个实体与动词出现前，通过解读话语中首个名词的格标记，预测后续实体的题元角色（thematic role）。在实验1中，我们采用了动词居中语序（verb-medial order，即名词1-动词-名词2）的话语，结果发现成人能够在获取动词信息前利用格标记信息，而儿童仅能在动词信息可用后完成该操作。在实验2中，我们使用了动词末尾语序（verb-final utterances，即名词1-名词2-动词）的话语，该语序为首个名词的格标记处理提供了更多时间，结果发现儿童与成人在利用格标记信息，于第二个实体与动词出现前预测第二个实体的身份时表现相似。