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ERIC Number: EJ1231508
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2019-Nov
Pages: 27
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
The Acquisition and Use of Relative Clauses in Turkish-Learning Children's Conversational Interactions: A Cross-Linguistic Approach
Uzundag, Berna A.; Küntay, Aylin C.
Journal of Child Language, v46 n6 p1142-1168 Nov 2019
Using a cross-linguistic approach, we investigated Turkish-speaking children's acquisition and use of relative clauses (RCs) by examining longitudinal child-caregiver interactions and cross-sectional peer conversations. Longitudinal data were collected from 8 children between the ages of 8 and 36 months. Peer conversational corpus came from 78 children aged between 43 and 64 months. Children produced RCs later than in English (Diessel, 2004) and Mandarin (Chen & Shirai, 2015), and demonstrated increasing semantic and structural complexity with age. Despite the morphosyntactic difficulty of object RCs, and prior experimental findings showing a subject RC advantage, preschool-aged children produced object RCs, which were highly frequent in child-directed speech, as frequently as subject RCs. Object RCs in spontaneous speech were semantically less demanding (with pronominal subjects and inanimate head nouns) than the stimuli used in prior experiments. Results suggest that multiple factors such as input frequency and morphosyntactic and semantic difficulty affect the acquisition patterns.
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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
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A