ERIC Number: EJ1102966
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Jul
Pages: 27
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
The Interpretation of Logical Connectives in Turkish
Geçkin, Vasfiye; Crain, Stephen; Thornton, Rosalind
Journal of Child Language, v43 n4 p784-810 Jul 2016
This study investigated how Turkish-speaking children and adults interpret negative sentences with disjunction (English "or") and ones with conjunction (English "and"). The goal was to see whether Turkish-speaking children and adults assigned the same interpretation to both kinds of sentences and, if not, to determine the source of the differences. Turkish-speaking children and adults were found to assign different interpretations to negative sentences with disjunction just in case the nouns in the disjunction phrase were marked with accusative case. For children, negation took scope over disjunction regardless of case marking, whereas, for adults, disjunction took scope over negation if the disjunctive phrases were case marked. Both groups assigned the same interpretation to negative sentences with conjunction; both case-marked and non-case-marked conjunction phrases took scope over negation. The findings are taken as evidence for a "subset" principle of language learnability that dictates children's initial scope assignments.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Child Language, Turkish, Children, Adults, Sentences, Form Classes (Languages), Nouns, Interpretive Skills, Comprehension, Comparative Analysis, Age Differences, Contrastive Linguistics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Turkey
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A