Edited by Belma Haznedar and F. Nihan Ketrez
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 20] 2016
► pp. 99–118
This paper summarizes recent studies with Turkish-speaking children that explore whether children’s online parsing shares adult processing features. We review findings from a self-paced listening study on the processing of relative clauses that reveals incremental integration of case-marking cues and an eye-tracking study that reveals predictive interpretation of case-marking cues independent of the verb and the word order. We discuss the idea that prediction is a natural by-product of incremental interpretation once we assume that our competence grammar is a lexicalized one that allows one-to-one correspondence between syntactic and semantic rules. We then show how Combinatory Categorial Grammar could secure a parsing mechanism combining incrementality and predictivity, without sacrificing a bottom-up algorithm, thanks to its monotonic and monostratal nature that allows flexible constituency.