Processing canonical and non-canonical word orders in Turkish: behavioral and ERP evidence from adults and children.
4 affiliations
- 1Institute of Health Sciences, Istanbul Medipol University, Istanbul, Türkiye.
- 2Department of Speech and Language Therapy, Istanbul Medipol University, Istanbul, Türkiye.
- 3Vocational School of Health Services, Altınbaş University, Istanbul, Türkiye.
- 4Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Neurobiology of Language Department, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
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.
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BibTeX
@article{dudu2026processing,
title = {{Processing canonical and non-canonical word orders in Turkish: behavioral and ERP evidence from adults and children.}},
author = {Medine Dudu and Yağmur Köyel Yıldırım and Talat Bulut},
journal = {Frontiers in human neuroscience},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.3389/fnhum.2026.1968429},
url = {https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42908908},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Processing canonical and non-canonical word orders in Turkish: behavioral and ERP evidence from adults and children.
AU - Medine Dudu
AU - Yağmur Köyel Yıldırım
AU - Talat Bulut
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/07
JO - Frontiers in human neuroscience
DO - 10.3389/fnhum.2026.1968429
UR - https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42908908
AB - 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.
SN - 1662-5161
ER -