Lexicon-grammar continuity in Turkish children's language growth


Turkay F. N. A.

LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING: THE ROLE OF LEXIS AND SEMANTICS IN CHILD LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT, cilt.50, ss.123-142, 2013 (SSCI) identifier

Özet

In language development, children must learn among others to use the different classes of words available in their languages, as well as to combine these words into increasingly complex syntactical structures. In this paper, I investigate both the lexical development and lexical bootstrapping effects on grammatical development of five Turkish-speaking children in the age range between 1;03 and 2;05. Specifically, I focus on changes in vocabulary size across time, as well as correlations between these evolutionary paths and changes in both vocabulary composition and mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUmorph) and in verbs. In this paper, I will highlight the development of verb morphology in an agglutinative language which has a very productive morphology on verbs as in Turkish. With this analysis, I emphasize the importance of verbal morphology as an indicator of grammar emergence. I claim that language-specific characteristics of any language may follow a different pattern in the overall look. However, a closer look into those language properties will show that though the patterns do not look similar among languages, the output is identical when language-unique trajetories are considered.