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Turkish children use morphosyntactic bootstrapping in interpreting verb meaning*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2008

TILBE GÖKSUN ,
AYLIN C. KÜNTAY  and
LETITIA R. NAIGLES
TILBE GÖKSUN
Affiliation:
Temple University and Koç University
AYLIN C. KÜNTAY*
Affiliation:
Koç University
LETITIA R. NAIGLES
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
*
Address for correspondence: Aylin C. Küntay, Koç University, Department of Psychology, Rumelifeneri Yolu, Sariyer, Istanbul, Turkey34450. tel: +90.212.338.1409; fax: +90.212.338.3760; e-mail: akuntay@ku.edu.tr
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Abstract

How might syntactic bootstrapping apply in Turkish, which employs inflectional morphology to indicate grammatical relations and allows argument ellipsis? We investigated whether Turkish speakers interpret constructions differently depending on the number of NPs in the sentence, the presence of accusative case marking and the causative morpheme. Data were collected from 60 child speakers and 16 adults. In an adaptation of Naigles, Gleitman & Gleitman (1993), the participants acted out sentences (6 transitive and 6 intransitive verbs in four different frames). The enactments were coded for causativity. Causative enactments increased in two-argument frames and decreased in one-argument frames, albeit to a lesser extent than previously found in English. This effect was generally stronger in children than in adults. Causative enactments increased when the accusative case marker was present. The causative morpheme yielded no increase in causative enactments. These findings highlight roles for morphological and syntactic cues in verb learning by Turkish children.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , May 2008 , pp. 291 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

*

This work has been supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences, in the framework of the Young Scientist Award Program to Aylin C. Küntay (EA-TÜBA-GEBİP/2001-2-13), and by Koç University, which sponsored Letitia Naigles' sabbatical. Portions of this research have been presented at the 2005 Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Language, at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, and at Boğaziçi University and the University of Connecticut. We thank our audiences for their comments; we also thank James Boster, Reyhan Furman, Len Katz, Nihan Ketrez and Aslı Özyürek for their specific and valuable suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also thank İrem Güroğlu for coding the data for inter-rater reliability. We owe this work to the cooperation of many children in several preschools in Istanbul, and their parents and teachers.

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