Do typological differences in the expression of causality influence preschool children’s causal event construal?

Abstract This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in causal expressions influence the mapping of language on events three- to four-year-old Swiss-German learners and Turkish learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed syntactically with lexical causatives (e.g., ässe ‘to eat’ vs. füettere feed’). Turkish, both morphologically – a verbal suffix yemek yeDIRmek Moreover, unlike allows argument ellipsis ‘The mother feeds [?]’). Here, we used pseudo-verbs test how well Swiss-German-learning children inferred meaning from compared Turkish-learning tested three conditions: causatives, morphological object ellipsis. all conditions reliably meanings, did so similar extent. The findings suggest that, as young age 3, learning two different languages similarly make use language-specific cues (syntactic alike) infer meanings.