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The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood
Edited by Belma Haznedar and F. Nihan Ketrez
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 20] 2016
► pp. 29–56

Sensitivity of Turkish infants to vowel harmony

Preference shift from familiarity to novelty

| Middle East Technical University, Turkey
| Okan International University, USA
| Middle East Technical University, Turkey
| LMU Munich, Germany
| Turkish Military Academy, Turkey

In a longitudinal study we found that 6- and 10-month-old monolingual Turkish infants are already sensitive to backness vowel harmony in stem-suffix sequences. Using a head-turn paradigm, listening times between 2 vowel-harmonic and 2 vowel-disharmonic lists of words for backness and rounding harmony were compared. While only main effects of age and trial were found for rounding harmony, in backness harmony a significant interaction between harmony and age was found: 6-month-olds preferred listening to harmonic words whereas 10-month-olds preferred listening to disharmonic words. This finding is reminiscent of the “familiarity-to-novelty-shift” in cognitive development, indicating that younger infants first extract the regular, harmonic pattern in their ambient language, whereas older infants’ attention is drawn to irregular, disharmonic tokens, due to violation-of-expectation.

Keywords: phonological development, head-turn paradigm, familiarity-to-novelty shift, Turkish vowel harmony
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Vowels and vowel harmony in Turkish
    • 1.2Studies on the acquisition of vowel harmony in Turkish
    • 1.3Studies in other languages
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Research aim, hypotheses, and design
    • 2.3Materials
      • 2.3.1Auditory stimuli
    • 2.4General and experimental procedure
    • 2.5Coding criteria
    • 2.6Validation study with adult native speakers of Turkish
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Mixed Linear Effect Model (MLE) analyses
      • 3.1.1MLE Model-1: all variables included
      • 3.1.2MLE Model-2: BF and RU harmony separately
      • 3.1.3Summary of results of MLE Models 1 and 2
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.02hon
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