Chapter published in:
Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 53–68

Chapter 4
Requests in Turkish and German child-directed and child speech

Evidence from different socio-economic backgrounds

| University of Vienna, Austria
| University of Vienna, Austria
| University of Vienna, Austria
On the basis of parent-child interaction data of families from different socio-economic status (SES), we discuss the usage of requests in input and output of three-year old monolingual German-speaking children and bilingual children speaking mainly Turkish at home. Whereas high SES parents are known to use more conversation-eliciting speech acts, low SES parents often show a behavior-directing conversation style. Especially, directive speech acts provide an interesting testing ground for exploring different conversation styles. Results confirm the expected SES differences for the monolingual, but not for the bilingual parents. Nevertheless, we find similar tendencies in both monolingual and bilingual children, such as HSES children use more indirect requests, whereas LSES children use more direct requests and ask more real questions.
Keywords: socio-economic status, request (direct vs. indirect), parenting styles, bilingual children
Article outline
  • 1.Background
    • 1.1Introduction
    • 1.2Socio-economic status and parenting style
    • 1.3Speech acts
    • 1.4Requests in Turkish and German
    • 1.5Hypotheses and aims
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Procedure
    • 2.3Transcription and coding
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Turkish
      • 3.1.1Speech acts
      • 3.1.2Directive speech acts: Real questions vs. requests
      • 3.1.3Direct vs. indirect requests
    • 3.2German
      • 3.2.1Speech acts
      • 3.2.2Directive speech acts: Real questions vs. requests
      • 3.2.3Direct vs. indirect requests
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.04kor
References
Aksu, A.
1973 The Development of Request Forms in Turkish Children. Ms, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
1974 Order of Emergence of Request Forms in Terms of Semantic Complexity. Ms, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Aksu-Koç, A.
1988 The Acquisition of Aspect and Modality: The Case of Past Reference in Turkish. Cambridge: CUP.  CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Aksu-Koç, A. & Ketrez, F. N.
2003 Early verbal morphology in Turkish: Emergence of inflections. In Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition: A Crosslinguistic Perspective, D. Bittner, W. U. Dressler & M. Kilani-Schoch (eds), 27–52. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Aksu-Koç, A. & Slobin, D. I.
1985 The acquisition of Turkish. In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, D. I. Slobin (ed.), 839–878. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Bernicot, J., Laval, V. & Chaminaud, S.
2007 Nonliteral language forms in children: In what order are they acquired in pragmatics and metapragmatics? Journal of Pragmatics 39: 2115–2132.  CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Czinglar, C., Korecky-Kröll, K., Uzunkaya-Sharma, K. & Dressler, W. U.
2015 Wie beeinflusst der sozioökonomische Status den Erwerb der Erst- und Zweitsprache? Wortschatzerwerb und Geschwindigkeit im NP/DP-Erwerb bei Kindergartenkindern im türkisch-deutschen Kontrast (How does the socioeconomic status influence acquisition of the first and the second language? Vocabulary acquisition and speed of NP/DP acquisition in kindergarten children from a Turkish-German contrastive perspective). In Deutsche Grammatik in Kontakt. Deutsch als Zweitsprache in Schule und Unterricht [German Grammar in Contact. German as a Second Language at School and in Instruction], K. M. Köpcke & A. Ziegler (eds), 207–240. Berlin: De Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ervin-Tripp, S.
1977 Wait for me, roller skate! In Child Discourse, S. Ervin-Tripp & C. Mitchell-Kernan (eds), 165–188. New York NY: Academic Press.  CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gawlitzek, I., Loboda, L. & Vogelbacher, M.
2015 Der Einfluss von Prozess- und Strukturcharakteristika in der Familie auf die Sprachkompetenz der Kinder (The influence of process and structure characteristics of families on children’s language competence). Paper presented at the Austrian Academy of Sciences , Vienna, November 10th.
Hart, B. & Risley T. R.
1995 Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore MD: Paul Brookes.Google Scholar
Hoff-Ginsberg, E.
1991 Mother-child conversation in diffferent social classes and communicative settings. First Language 12: 233–244.  CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hoff, E.
2003 The specificity of environmental influence: Socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development 74: 1368–78.  CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hoff, E., Laursen, B. & Tardif, T.
2002 Socioeconomic status and parenting. In Handbook of Parenting. Biology and Ecology of Parenting, M. H. Bornstein (ed.), 231–252. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Kilani-Schoch, M., Sánchez Miret, F. & Dressler, W. U.
2011 Towards naturalness scales of pragmatic complexity. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 47: 237–263.  CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Korecky-Kröll, K., Uzunkaya-Sharma, K., Czinglar, C., Sommer-Lolei, S., Yanagida, T. & Dressler, W. U.
2015 The lower the slower: Parental SES and input affect speed of development of vocabulary and morphology. Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium 2015 , University of Warwick, Coventry, July 21st.
Korecky-Kröll, K.
In press. Kodierung und Analyse mit CHILDES: Erfahrungen mit kindersprachlichen Spontansprachkorpora und erste Arbeiten zu einem rein erwachsenensprachlichen Spontansprachkorpus (Coding and analysis with CHILDES: Experiences with spontaneous speech child corpora and first work on a purely adult spontaneous speech corpus). To appear in Digitale Methoden der Korpusforschung in Österreich ( Digital Methods of Corpus Research in Austria ), C. Resch & W. U. Dressler (eds) Vienna Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
Korecky-Kröll, K., Czinglar, C., Uzunkaya-Sharma, K., Sommer-Lolei, S. & Dressler, W. U.
2016 Das INPUT-Projekt: Wortschatz- und Grammatikerwerb von ein- und zweisprachigen Wiener Kindergartenkindern. logoTHEMA 13(1): 16–22. (The INPUT project: Vocabulary and grammar acquisition in monolingual and bilingual Viennese kindergarten children).Google Scholar
Korecky, P. C.
2015 CLANTOCSV [Computer software].Google Scholar
Labov, W.
1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lyons, J.
1977 Semantics. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B.
2000 The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Marti, L.
2006 Indirectness and politeness in Turkish-German bilingual and Turkish monolingual requests. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 1836–1869.  CrossrefGoogle Scholar
OECD
1999 Classifying Educational Programmes. Manual for ISCED-97 Implementation in OECD Countries. OECD: 1999 Edition.Google Scholar
Rowe, M.
2008 Child-directed speech: Relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of child development and child vocabulary skill. Journal of Child Language 35: 108–205.  CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 Recording, transcribing, and coding interaction. In Research Methods in Child Language: A Practical Guide, E. Hoff (ed.), 193–207. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Searle, J. R. & Vanderveken, D.
1985 Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Christiner, Markus, Stefanie Rüdegger & Susanne Maria Reiterer
2018. Sing Chinese and tap Tagalog? Predicting individual differences in musical and phonetic aptitude using language families differing by sound-typology. International Journal of Multilingualism 15:4 ► pp. 455 ff. Crossref logo
Weichselbaum, Maria & Verena Blaschitz
2019. Deutschförderung und sprachliche Bildung in der Elementarpädagogik – Befunde und Empfehlungen aus einem Wiener Forschungsprojekt. ÖDaF-Mitteilungen 35:1+2 ► pp. 159 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 march 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.