Reyhan Furman

My research focuses on caused motion events (e.g. a boy pulls a box into a room) which are basic events where an Agent (the boy) performs an Action (pulling) that causes a Figure (box) to move in a spatial Path (into) to a Goal (the room).

Specifically, I examine how Turkish-speaking children learn to represent caused motion events in speech and gesture. I am interested in whether children's verbal and gestural encoding of caused motion events are language-specific from the start and how the adult patterns develop. To this end, I study the spontaneous speech and gestures of children aged 1-3 longitudinally. I also examine elicited caused motion descriptions of 3- to 5-year-olds and compare them to those of adults. I aim to determine how the language they learn to speak influences children's event representations in speech and gesture.