Clause Chaining and Discourse Continuity in Turkish Children's Narratives

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Children's acquisition of complex sentence structures is a key area in language development research.
• Clause combining and clause chaining are crucial for narrative coherence and advanced linguistic expression.
• Understanding the developmental trajectory of non-finite clause use in Turkish provides insights into cross-linguistic language acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the developmental progression of complex sentences featuring non-finite clause combining in Turkish-speaking children.
• To specifically analyze the emergence and characteristics of clause chaining, focusing on converbal clauses.
• To examine how sentence length, variety of clauses, and frequency of use evolve with age.

Main Methods:

• Elicited narrative data from 40 Turkish-speaking children (ages 4-11) and 6 adults using a wordless picture book.
• Analysis of complex sentence structures, focusing on non-finite clause combinations and clause chaining.
• Age-based comparison of syntactic complexity, clause variety, and frequency of complex sentence use.

Main Results:

• A clear developmental trend showing increased variety, length, and frequency of complex sentences with age.
• Converbal clause chains are the earliest and most prevalent form of clause combination, present from age 4.
• Older children and adults utilize combinations of adverbial, complement, relative, and converbal clauses in multi-non-finite clause sentences.

Conclusions:

• Clause chaining is an early developing strategy for establishing aspectual-temporal and temporal-causal continuity in narratives.
• Referential continuity, both within and across sentences, is established early in development (from age 4).
• The findings highlight the interplay between narrative demands and the syntactic-semantic complexity of Turkish clause-combining devices.