11. The (scarcity of) diminutives in Turkish child language

This study reports that diminutive morphology is not one of the early acquisitions in Turkish child speech (1;3–2;0), although the language has a number of productive diminutive morphemes. Similarly the use of hypocoristic forms of nouns is not a typical property of Turkish child speech. We attribute the scarcity of diminutives and hypocoristic forms in child speech to their infrequent use in the input speech and the complexity of the diminutive formation in the language which does not have properties that could facilitate word learning.