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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. 153–175

Children’s referential choices in Turkish

Experimentally elicited and conversationally occasioned determinants

| Koç University, Turkey
| University of Chicago, Illinois
| Koç University, Turkey | Utrecht University, the Netherlands

We present research on the emergence and development of verbal and non-verbal referential skills of Turkish L1 learners. Turkish has interesting distinctive features compared to other frequently studied languages. The first section presents an overview of research about typically developing L1 learners’ comprehension and production skills in various preverbal and verbal referential situations. The second section presents contrastively interesting properties of Turkish setting the ground for crosslinguistic comparisons. The third section reviews experimental research on Turkish L1 learners’ referential communication skills. The fourth section reviews naturalistic studies about verbal and nonverbal devices employed by Turkish L1 learners during referential interactions with primary caregivers. Finally, we provide critical evaluation and future directions.

Keywords: referential communication, nonverbal communication, experimental and naturalistic methods, crosslinguistic research, pro-drop languages, argument structure
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overview of development of referential skills
  • 3.Why studying referential communication in Turkish is important
    • 3.1Word order
    • 3.2Variation and referential sets
    • 3.3Pro-drop argument realization system
    • 3.4Optional determiner system
    • 3.5Three-way demonstrative pronoun system
    • 3.6Relative clause structures
  • 4.Experimental studies on Turkish-learning children’s referential communication skills
  • 5.Naturalistic studies examining Turkish-learning children’s referential communication skills
  • 6.Concluding remarks and future directions
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.07ate
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