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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 14:2 (2024) ► pp.218–254

Relative clauses in child heritage speakers of Turkish in the United States

ORCID logo | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
How does complex syntax develop in heritage language children? This study investigates child Turkish heritage speakers’ comprehension and production of relative clauses (RCs) in Turkish and in English. RCs vary on their syntactic functions (subject, object) and show asymmetric patterns of acquisition and processing, which have been explained by linear distance, structural distance and input factors. Thirty-two child Turkish HS (ages 6–15) and 48 monolingual Turkish children (ages 3–15) completed a picture-sentence matching (comprehension) task and a sentence repetition (production) task in Turkish. The Turkish HS were tested on the RC comprehension and production tasks in English as well. The results indicated that the child HS showed (i) better performance in English than in Turkish with increasing age, (ii) better comprehension than production of Turkish RCs, (iii) replacement of complex RCs with simple juxtaposition in Turkish, and (iv) a subject advantage in comprehension. We take these findings to suggest that Turkish RCs do not fully develop in child HS of Turkish in the U.S., although the strength of this explanation must be corroborated by a study of child and adult HS. Overall, the findings are most compatible with the structural distance account and other factors that may affect production.
Keywords: heritage language acquisition, child heritage speakers, Turkish, relative clauses
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Relative clauses in English and Turkish
  • 3.Acquisition of RCs in Turkish
  • 4.The study
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Tasks
      • 5.2.1Picture sentence matching task
      • 5.2.2Sentence repetition task
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1The comprehension task
    • 6.2The production task
    • 6.3Error analysis
  • 7.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.21027.cos
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