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Turkish speaking children's early lexicon in terms of noun/verb dominance| old_uid | 1021 |
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| title | Turkish speaking children's early lexicon in terms of noun/verb dominance |
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| start_date | 2006/04/04 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | A great number of research findings reveal that nouns are acquired earlier than verbs because basic level object categories are represented by nouns, leading to dominance of nouns over verbs. This noun-before-verb acquisition pattern is universal regardless of the language (Gentner, 1981, 1982; Au et al, 1994; Caselli et al, 1995). However, some researchers are in disagreement with this claim and they propose that verbs can be acquired earlier than nouns as children are exposed to more verbs in the maternal input and some language characteristics such as word order and morphology can reinforce dominance of verbs over nouns (Choi & Gopnik, 1993, 1995; Tardif, 1993, 1996). This constitutes the other end of this controversial topic. Therefore, the arguments show two opposite ends: universal conceptual constraints versus language characteristics. The primacy of nouns or verbs have been studied in different languages, such as English, German, Korean and Chinese by using various data collection tools. However, this issue was not studied in Turkish by means of longitudinal data-frequency analysis. Leading Turkish researchers focused on that aspect but their analysis were different (Küntay & Slobin, 1996, 2001, 2002; Ketrez & Aksu-Koç, 2003; Ketrez, 2004). That is why, this study mainly concentrated on Turkish speaking children’s lexical development in terms of noun and verb frequencies. Another much debated issue is the role of the motherese. Choi (2000) states that “in various domains of language, there is a growing body of evidence that caregiver input influences children’s early language”. Tardiff, Shatz & Naigles (1997) compared the degree of saliency of nouns and verbs in caregivers’ spontaneous speech in English, Chinese and Italian. As a result of this study, it was shown that Chinese caregivers provided verbs more frequently than English and Italian caregivers, and verbs are at the end of their utterances. In line with this argument, it is claimed that such language specific properties in the input may explain the early acquisition of verbs by children. Turkish is also a language in which verb is placed at the end of the clause and because of the rich inflectional system a single verb can stand for a sentence. Some elements (even the head in some some noun phrases) can be dropped in utterances; whereas, verbs cannot. This study also investigated the Turkish motherese in terms of this structural property. The findings of the study indicated that the frequency of nouns in Turkish speaking children’s early lexicon was not considerably higher than their verbs. Nouns became statistically dominant over verbs in a very limited number of observed times. The results of this study supported an important point regarding noun and verb acquisition pattern. In all children, verb acquisition was more progressive, whereas the nouns were context-dependent. In some children, towards the end of the data collection period, a higher verb frequency over nouns was seen |
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| responsibles | Coupé |
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