Faculty of Humanities
T. Yarbay Duman
dr. T. (Tuba) Yarbay Duman
Capaciteitsgroep Taalwetenschap University of Amsterdam


Spuistraat 210
1012 VT Amsterdam
Room: 306

Telephone
0205253104

http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/t.yarbayduman/
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I am working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Linguistics Department of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I am currently running an NWO-Veni research project entitled 'Identifying Specific Language Impairment in monolingual and bilingual children: Executive functions and linguistic processing'.

I am a member of the international 'Test for Assessing Reference of Time (TART)' project on aphasia at the University of Groningen.

Previously I completed the PhD project 'Turkish Agrammatic Aphasia: Word Order, Time Reference and Case' at the University of Groningen, with an NWO-Mosaic grant. Below you will find more information on these projects.

Amsterdam Center for Language and Cognition

Research group Grammar and Cognition

Research Interests

  • Specific Language Impairment, with a special interest in morphosyntactic impairments, grammatical processing, and Executive Functions
  • Aphasia, with a special interest in morphosyntactic impairments, time-reference, and discourse functions e.g. broad / narrow focus.
  • Multilingualism

Current Research

Identifying specific language impairment in monolingual and bilingual children: Executive functions and linguistic processing

Identifying specific language impairment (SLI) is difficult, particulary in bilinguals. In immigrant settings, SLI is usually diagnosed on the basis of second language. However, the language problems of bilingual children in L2 may either stem from SLI or poor L2 acquisition, which is commonly observed in typical bilingual development (TBD) (e.g. both groups may use bare verb stems). Accordingly, it is sometimes not possible to distinguish the effects of SLI and TBD on L2. This possibly results in misdiagnoses.

The aim of this project is to reveal a distinguishing characteristics that can identify SLI both in monolinguals and bilinguals. Previous research shows that children with SLI suffer from linguistic impairments and, unliketypically developing bilinguals (TDB), bilingual children with SLI (BISLI) perform poorly on executive functions (EF) such as inhibition, working memory and planning.The findings that children with SLI sufferfrom linguistic impairments and that BISLI perform poorly on EF while TDB perform well suggest thatthere may be a link between EF and linguistic impairments, which is present in BISLI but absent from TDB. However,such link has not been established in SLI yet.

This project explores the existence of a causal link between EF and linguistic impairments by an approach that allows the measurement of both specific EF performance (inhibition, working memory, planning)and the processing of particular linguistic structures (counterfactuals & hypotheticals) which require the use of the same EF, and investigating the correlation between the two. This approach permits straightforward comparisons between EF performance and linguistic processing and permits the investigation of whether impaired EF can actually cause linguistic impairments in SLI.

The subjects are Turkish-Dutch BISLI, monolingual Turkish SLI children and their TDB and monolingual peers.

This research is funded by the VENI Innovational Research Incentives Scheme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under Grant No 016.114.065  to Tuba Yarbay Duman.



DownloadVeni Research Project Summary

TART (Test for Assessing Reference of Time) Project

This is an international project that tests comprehension and production of time reference in aphasia by using same test items in more than 15 languages (e.g.Turkish, Dutch, Chinese, Indonesian, English, Greek etc.) under the guidance of Prof. Roelien Bastiaanse of the University of Groningen. Please follow the link below to learn more about this project. You can contact me if you have specific questions about the Turkish version of TART (Yarbay Duman & Bastiaanse, 2008 unpl., Groningen: University of Groningen).  

TART Project

Previous Research

Turkish Agrammatic Aphasia: Word Order, Time Reference and Case

From 2004-2009 September, I worked as a PhD (assistant in opleiding: AIO) at the Neurolinguistics Department of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Mycolleagues and I developed a number of sentence production and sentence comprehension tests to assess grammatical impairments in Turkish Broca’s aphasia. The data obtained suggest that individuals with Broca’s aphasia prefer producing sentences with subject-object-verb order, although word order is flexible in Turkish. Sentences with this order are also the easiest to understand, but only when simple case marking is used. Finally, reference to the past with verbs is selectively impaired.

We proposed the Integration Problem Hypothesis (IPH) (Yarbay Duman et. al, in press) that explains the nature of impairment in Broca's aphasia through interactions between word order, time reference and case. According to the IPH,when agrammatic speakers should use derived order, case that is non-baseor remote verb forms, their performance drops significantly. When variables add up, difficulties add up as well. For example, object relatives  with derived wordorder and non-base case are more problematic to produce for individuals with Broca’s aphasia than subject relatives with derived word order and base case (Yarbay Duman et al., 2008). Furthermore, reference to the past through verb inflection is more difficult than reference to the future in sentences with a base order, however the ability to produce time reference morphology and object relatives leads to a decrease in performance in the future time frame (Yarbay Duman & Bastiaanse, 2009).

This research was funded by the Mosaic Program of the Netherlands Organizationfor Scientific Research (NWO) under Grant No: 017.001.164 to Tuba YarbayDuman.

For those who are interested: below you can download my doctoral thesis or you can download each Chapter of the thesis from the Publications page as seperate articles published in international peer-refereed journals.  

Download my doctoral thesis

Go to Publications page

Conference and Workshop Presentations (including invited talks/lectures)

Upcoming

 

  • Invited Talk, ANELA Colloquium, Lunteren, May 9, 2012. Counterfactuals and Executive Functions in Specific Language Impairment.

 

  • Invited Talk, Languages in Contact (LinC) Colloquium Series, Radboud University, Nijmegen, September 18, 2012. Titel tba (topic: Specific Language Impairment)

 

  • Poster, International Conference on Science of Aphasia 13, Groningen, September 2012. Broad versus Narrow Focus In Turkish Broca's Aphasia.

 

  • Invited Talk, Amsterdam Center for Language and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, November 2, 2012. Titel tba.  (topic:Specific Language Impairment: language & cognition)

                                            

 

 

 

 

 

 

Given

 

  • Word order, time reference and case in Agrammatic Broca's Aphasia. Amsterdam Center for Language and Cognition, University of Amsterdam. Invited Talk, November 18, 2011.

 

  • A new approach in diagnosing monolingual and bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment. Talk given at the Turkish National Congress of Speech and Language Disorders, 6, Eskisehir, Turkey (Tekdilli ve Ikidilli Cocuklarda Ozgul Dil Bozuklugu Teshisinde Yeni Bir Yontem, 6. Ulusal Dilve Konusma Bozukluklari Kongresi, Eskisehir, Turkiye), May 29, 2011.

 

  • Sentence Comprehension in Turkish Broca's Aphasia: An integration problem. Talk given at the Science of Aphasia X, Antalya, Turkey, September 29, 2009.

 

  • Agrammatism in Turkish: Word Order, Time Reference and Case. Talk given at the Workshop Grammar and Aphasia: where theoretical, psycho-and neurolinguistics meet, Groningen, September18, 2009.

 

  • Time Reference through verb inflection in Turkishagrammatic aphasia.Poster presented at the Science of Aphasia, IX, Chalkidiki, Greece, September 22, 2008.

 

  • Inflectional Deficits in agrammatic aphasia, European Masters in Clinical Linguistics, University of Groningen.  Invited Lecture, January 29, 2008.

 

  • Evaluation of the cross-linguistic data on aphasia. European Masters in Clinical Linguistics, University of Groningen. Invited Lecture, March 4, 2008.

 

  • Time Referenceand Verb inflection in Turkish agrammaticaphasia.Talk given at the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN) Retreat, Odoorn, April 3, 2008.

 

  • A remoteness model of time reference in agrammatic aphasia. Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN) poster session, Groningen, March 6, 2008.

 

  • Nominative case in Turkish: when morhology fails in Broca'saphasia. Comprehension and production disorders workshop, Potsdam, Germany. Invited Talk, July 6, 2007.

 

  • Origin of the problems with finite verbs:past tense and grammatical mood. European Masters in Clinical Linguistics, University of Groningen. Invited Lecture, February 13, 2007.

 

  • Object Scrambling and Finiteness in Turkish agrammatic production. Talk given at 44th annual meeting of the Academy of Aphasia, Victoria BC, Canada, October 15, 2006.

 

  • NP movementand verb inflection deficits in agrammatic aphasia:a comparison between Turkish and Dutch, Neurolinguistics III, University of Groningen. Invited Lecture, September 14, 2006.

 

  • Object scrambling and verb inflection in Turkish agrammatic production. Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN) poster session, Groningen, July 6, 2006.

 

  • Syntactic MovementinTurkish AgrammaticProduction. Talk given at the 43rd annual meeting of the Academy of Aphasia, Amsterdam, October 24, 2005.

 

  • Object scrambling and Finiteness in Turkishagrammatic production. Poster presentedat the Science of Aphasia 6, Heksinki, Finland, August 27, 2005.

 

  • Role of tense as finiteness and syntactic movement in Turkish agrammatc production. Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN) poster session, Groningen, February 3, 2005.

 

  • Relative clauses and Object scrambling in Turkish agrammatic production. Talk given at the Science of Aphasia 5, Potsdam, Germany, September 18. 2004.

 

  • Sentence Production in Turkish agrammatic Aphasia: relativeclauses and object scrambling. Poster presented at NWO summer school Language and Perception, Doorwerth, October 18, 2004.