Turkish children use morphosyntactic bootstrapping in interpreting verb meaning
Tilbe Göksun1, Aylin C Küntay, Letitia R Naigles
1Temple University, Turkey.
Journal of Child Language
|April 18, 2008
Summary
Turkish children use syntactic cues like case marking to learn verbs. Morphological and syntactic information aids verb acquisition, with effects stronger in children than adults.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Developmental Linguistics
- Turkish Language Acquisition
Background:
- Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory of child language acquisition.
- Turkish is a morphologically rich, agglutinative language with argument ellipsis.
- Understanding how children learn verbs in morphologically complex languages is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the application of syntactic bootstrapping in Turkish.
- To examine how Turkish speakers interpret sentences based on NP number, accusative case marking, and causative morphemes.
- To compare verb learning cues in children and adults.
Main Methods:
- Adaptation of Naigles, Gleitman & Gleitman (1993) experimental paradigm.
- Participants (60 children, 16 adults) acted out sentences with transitive and intransitive verbs.
- Enactments were coded for causativity to assess interpretation.
Main Results:
- Causative enactments increased in two-argument frames and decreased in one-argument frames.
- These effects were generally stronger in child speakers than in adults.
- The presence of accusative case marking enhanced causative enactments, while the causative morpheme did not.
Conclusions:
- Syntactic cues, particularly argument structure and case marking, play a significant role in Turkish verb learning.
- Morphological information aids children in deciphering verb meaning and grammatical roles.
- Findings suggest that Turkish children utilize both syntactic and morphological cues for efficient verb acquisition.
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