Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley Assistant Professor Member, Developmental Program seyda@gsu.edu 756 Urban Life 404-413-6282 My personal/lab webpage

Research Interests

My research concerns the first glimmers of children’s earliest cognitive-linguistic abilities as they reveal themselves both in speech and in gesture. Specifically, I ask whether and how children’s gestures can inform us about language development, from the onset of first words and first sentences to the emergence of first metaphors. My current interests are reflected in two main lines of research: (1) whether gesture constitutes a robust aspect of the language-learning process, remaining preserved across different learners, and (2) whether gesture shows the language-specific patterns found in children’s speech, varying systematically across structurally different languages. Following these two lines of inquiry, I seek to understand the process of language development and how gesture serves as part of the mechanism of change in this process across different learners and different linguistic environments.

(1) Does gesture constitute a robust aspect of the language-learning process? My earlier work with typically developing children showed that gesture-speech development is a robust aspect of language learning, and acts as harbinger of change in the child’s developing language system. Children indicate objects and actions first in gesture before they begin to produce words to refer to these objects and actions. Even after they begin to produce their first words, children continue to use gesture, along with their words, to express sentence-like meanings (‘eat’+point at cookie), and convey increasingly more complex meanings first in a gesture-speech combination before expressing them entirely in speech. Around age 5, children develop the ability to understand and explain metaphors, and once again, they use gesture and speech together to convey metaphorical concepts before expressing them entirely in speech. My previous work places gesture at the cutting edge of language development; gesture signals oncoming changes in children’s speech and provides stepping-stones for learning new linguistic skills. My current work examines whether the gesture-speech system remains intact in atypically developing children (e.g., children with early brain injury or autism), and whether we can find evidence of delays atypical children exhibit in their speech first in gesture.

(2) Does gesture show the language-specific patterns found in children’s speech? I have previously shown that sighted children learning structurally different languages display language-specific patterns in their speech about motion at a young age. Thus spoken language input clearly has an immediate impact on children’s acquisition of that language. But children also produce gestures when they talk about motion, often mirroring the gestures that they see others produce. However, despite a great deal of description of cross-linguistic variation in gesture, little insight exists into the source of this variation. Do children learn language-specific gestures by watching others gesture or by simply learning to speak a particular language? I was recently awarded a grant by the March of Dimes Foundation to study whether and when blind children learning structurally different languages begin to produce language-specific gestures, and whether the onset time of language-specific gestures affects blind children’s acquisition rate of language-specific speech.

Selected Publications

Özçalışkan, Ş. (2003). Metaphorical motion in crosslinguistic perspective. A comparison of English and Turkish. Metaphor and Symbol, 18 (3), 189-228.

Özçalışkan, Ş. (2005). Metaphor meets typology: Ways of moving metaphorically in English and Turkish. Cognitive Linguistics, 16 (1), 207-246.

Özçalışkan, Ş. (2005). On learning to draw the distinction between physical and metaphorical motion: Is metaphor an early emerging cognitive and linguistic capacity? Journal of Child Language, 32 (2), 291-318.

Özçalışkan, Ş. & Goldin-Meadow, S.  (2005). Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development. Cognition, 96 (3), B101-B113.

Özçalışkan, Ş. & Goldin-Meadow, S.  (2005). Do parents lead their children by the hand?Journal of Child Language, 32 (3), 481-505.

Özçalışkan, Ş. & Goldin-Meadow, S.  (2006). Role of gesture in children’s early constructions. In Eve Clark & Barbara Kelly (Eds.), Constructions in acquisition (pp. 31-58). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Özçalışkan, Ş. (2007). Metaphors we ‘move by’: Children’s developing understanding of metaphorical motion in typologically distinct languages. Metaphor and Symbol, 22 (2), 147-168.

Özçalışkan, Ş. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008). When gesture-speech combinations do and do not index linguistic change. Language and Cognitive Processes, in press.