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Part of
The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood
Edited by Belma Haznedar and F. Nihan Ketrez
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 20] 2016
► pp. 193–220

Scene-setting and referent introduction in sign and spoken languages

What does modality tell us?

| Radboud University & Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands

Previous studies show that children do not become adult-like in learning to set the scene and introduce referents in their narrations until 9 years of age and even beyond. However, they investigated spoken languages, thus we do not know much about how these skills are acquired in sign languages, where events are expressed in visually similar ways to the real world events, unlike in spoken languages. The results of the current study demonstrate that deaf children (3;5–9;10 years) acquiring Turkish Sign Language, and hearing children (3;8–9;11 years) acquiring spoken Turkish both acquire scene-setting and referent introduction skills at similar ages. Thus the modality of the language being acquired does not have facilitating or hindering effects in the development of these skills.

Keywords: language acquisition, narrative, Turkish Sign Language, Turkish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Scene setting and referent introduction in narrative discourse
    • 2.1Learning to set the scene and introduce referents in spoken languages
    • 2.2Learning to set the scene and introduce referents in sign languages
  • 3.Present study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Stimulus material and procedure
    • 3.3Data coding and analysis
      • 3.3.1Coding decisions for the analysis of scene-setting
      • 3.3.2Coding decisions for the analysis of referent introduction
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1The presence/absence of the scene-setting elements in Turkish and TİD
    • 4.2How explicitly the referents are introduced in Turkish and TİD narrations
  • 5.Summary and discussion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.09sum
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