The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood

Editorial page

Title page

LCC data

Dedication page

Table of contents

Introduction

1. Recent advances and the acquisition of Turkish

2. Previous studies on child Turkish

2.1 Development of morphosyntax and word order

2.2 Development of phonology, vowel harmony and word segmentation

2.3 Literacy development

2.4 Language disorders in Turkish

2.5 Key issues in childhood bilingualism

3. The contributions in this volume

4. Summary

Acknowledgements

References

Acquisition/processing of morphology, syntax and semantics

Sensitivity of Turkish infants to vowel harmony

1. Introduction

1.1 Vowels and vowel harmony in Turkish

1.2 Studies on the acquisition of vowel harmony in Turkish

1.3 Studies in other languages

2. Method

2.1 Participants

2.2 Research aim, hypotheses, and design

2.3 Materials

2.3.1 Auditory stimuli

2.4 General and experimental procedure

2.5 Coding criteria

2.6 Validation study with adult native speakers of Turkish

3. Results

3.1 Mixed Linear Effect Model (MLE) analyses6

3.1.1 MLE Model-1: all variables included

3.1.2 MLE Model-2: BF and RU harmony separately

3.1.3 Summary of results of MLE Models 1 and 2

4. Discussion

5. Conclusion and outlook

Acknowledgements

References

Turkish children’s early vocabulary

1. Introduction

2. Assessing lexical diversity

2.1 Computing type-to-token ratio (TTR)

2.2 Common methods of measuring lexical diversity

2.3 Early lexical acquisition: The view from Turkish

3. The current study

3.1 Participants and data

3.2 Transcription and coding procedures

3.3 Children’s lexicon sizes and measuring TTR across ages

3.3.1 Lexicon size: Descriptive statistics

3.3.2 TTRs with respect to age

3.4 Lexical diversity with respect to age: Herdan’s Log TTR

4. Summary and conclusions

Acknowledgments

References

Acquisition of canonical and non-canonical word orders in L1 Turkish

1. Introduction

2. Syntactic and pragmatic development in the acquisition of L1 word order

3. Acquisition of Turkish word order

4. Word order in Turkish

5. Pragmatic considerations in Turkish

6. The study

7. Results and discussion

8. Conclusion

References

What does online parsing in Turkish-speaking children reveal about grammar?

1. Introduction

2. Is child parsing incremental and predictive?

3. Online findings from children’s interpretation in head-final languages

4. What do these findings imply about the grammar?

4.1 Why CCG as a competence grammar?

4.2 Interpretation of the findings in Özge et al. (2015) and Özge et al. (2013)

5. Conclusion

References

Acquisition of scope relations by Turkish-English bilingual children

1. Introduction

2. The disjunction parameter

2.1 Disjunction in logic and in language

2.2 The implicature of exclusivity

2.3 Downward entailment

2.4 Scope ambiguities

2.5 The disjunction parameter

3. Temporal operators

4. The interpretation of logical expressions in child language

4.1 Monolingual child language

4.2 Bilingual child language

5. Experiment

5.1 Participants

5.2 Procedures

5.3 Materials

5.4 Research questions and predictions

6. Results

6.1 Pre-test with temporal operators: Before/önce

6.2 Pre-test with disjunction words: Or/ya da

7. Discussion

8. General discussion

9. Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

Discourse

Children’s referential choices in Turkish

1. Introduction

2. Overview of development of referential skills

3. Why studying referential communication in Turkish is important

3.1 Word order

3.2 Variation and referential sets

3.3 Pro-drop argument realization system

3.4 Optional determiner system

3.5 Three-way demonstrative pronoun system

3.6 Relative clause structures

4. Experimental studies on Turkish-learning children’s referential communication skills

5. Naturalistic studies examining Turkish-learning children’s referential communication skills

6. Concluding remarks and future directions

References

Learning to think, talk, and gesture about motion in language-specific ways

1. Introduction

2. Talking about motion

3. Gesturing about motion

4. Thinking about motion

5. Summary and future directions

References

Scene-setting and referent introduction in sign and spoken languages

1. Introduction

2. Scene setting and referent introduction in narrative discourse

2.1 Learning to set the scene and introduce referents in spoken languages

2.2 Learning to set the scene and introduce referents in sign languages

3. Present study

3.1 Participants

3.2 Stimulus material and procedure

3.3 Data coding and analysis

3.3.1 Coding decisions for the analysis of scene-setting

3.3.2 Coding decisions for the analysis of referent introduction

4. Results

4.1 The presence/absence of the scene-setting elements in Turkish and TİD

4.2 How explicitly the referents are introduced in Turkish and TİD narrations

5. Summary and discussion

References

Literacy development

Integrating cognitive and sociocultural aspects of reading in Turkish

1. Introduction

1.1 Reading development in orthographically transparent languages

1.2 Sociocultural aspects of literacy development

1.3 Integrating cognitive and sociocultural aspects of reading development in Turkish

2. Current study

3. Results

3.1 Factor analysis

4. Conclusions and implications for education

References

Phonological awareness in reading acquisition

1. Introduction

1.1 Phonological awareness

1.2 The present study

2. Method

2.1 Participants

2.2 Instruments

2.2.1 Tasks used in English

2.2.2 Tasks used in Turkish

2.3 Procedure

2.4 Data analyses

3. Results

3.1 Initial Analyses

3.2 Correlational analyses among variables

3.3 Regression analyses

3.4 Error analyses and development of phonological awareness

3.5 Cross-linguistic transfer

4. Discussion

4.1 The role of phonological awareness in word reading

4.2 Development of PA

4.3 Phonological awareness and cross-language transfer

5. Conclusion

6. Limitations of the study

References

Typical vs. Atypical development in monolingual and bilingual Turkish-speaking children

Vocabulary and grammar acquisition in Turkish as assessed by the Turkish communicative development inventory

1. Introduction

2. Communicative development Inventory-Turkish (CDI – TR)

3. Studies with CDI and CDI-TR

4. Purpose of the study

5. Method

5.1 Participants

5.2 Data statistics

6. Results

6.1 Words children use

6.2 Semantic categories

6.3 Noun and verb categories

6.4 Sentences and grammar

6.5 Mean length of the three longest utterances (M3L)

6.6 Noun and verb inflections

6.7 Sentence complexity

7. Discussion and conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

Language impairment in Turkish-speaking children

1. Introduction

2. Assessment of language impairments in Turkey

3. Studies in language impairment in Turkish

4. Study 1: Method

4.1 Participants and procedure

4.2 Results

5. Study 2: Method

5.1 Participants and procedure

5.2 Results

6. Nature of errors

6.1 Verbal morphology

6.2 Nominal morphology

7. General implications

Acknowledgements

References

Language development in Turkish-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

1. Introduction

2. Pragmatics

3. Lexicon/semantics

4. Morphology and syntax

5. Conclusion

References

Verbal functional categories in the speech of a Turkish speaking child with autism

1. Introduction

2. Autism spectrum disorders

2.1 Language in Autism

3. Functional categories of Turkish verbs

3.1 Verbal functional categories in Turkish

4. Typical acquisition of functional categories in Turkish

5. Methodology

5.1 The participant

5.2 The data

6. Discussion

7. Limitations and caveats

8. Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

L2 children do not fluctuate

1. Introduction

2. Indefinite articles in English and Turkish

3. L1 acquisition of English indefinite articles

4. Child L2 acquisition of English articles

5. Present study

6. Method

6.1 Participants

6.2 Materials

6.2.1 Production task

6.2.2 Self-paced listening task

6.3 Procedure

7. Results

7.1 Production task

7.1.1 Descriptive statistics

7.1.2 On-line processing task

8. Discussion

8.1 Fluctuation or transfer?

8.2 Production-processing (a)symmetries

9. Conclusions

Acknowledgements

References

Appendices

Appendix 1. Items in the production task

Appendix 2. Items in the on-line processing task

Second language exposure in the preschool

1. Introduction

1.1 Effects of L2 on L1

1.2 Effects of second language learning on executive functions

1.3 Motivation for and aims of the current study

2. Method

2.1 Participants

2.2 Instruments of assessment

2.2.1 Language competence tasks

2.2.2 Executive function tasks

2.2.3 Demographic form

2.3 Procedure

3. Results

4. Discussion

5. Conclusion

References

Index